Before Mars had any fixed cult statue, his presence at Rome was carried by a set of sacred spears kept in the Regia, the old royal house at the edge of the Forum; ancient writers record that their stirring of their own accord was read as a grave omen, and Plutarch reports such a sign among the portents said to precede the assassination of Julius Caesar. This spear-fetish stage of Mars, a god present in his weapon rather than in a human image, is older than any anthropomorphic statue and points to an Italic war-god considerably rougher and less classically Greek than the armoured youth of later art.
That later image, in full armour with helmet, spear and shield, owes much to Hellenistic sculpture, and the Etruscan bronze known as the Mars of Todi, a young warrior in the same guise, shows the type already established in central Italy before Rome's own art fully absorbed it. The identification with Ares carried through to give Mars the alchemical metal iron and the planet named for him, and dies Martis, Mars's day, survives in the Romance languages as mardi and martedi. Renaissance and Baroque painters returned often to Mars disarmed by Venus, an allegory of love overcoming war that Botticelli painted around 1483 and that later artists, including Rubens, reworked as a plea for peace.