The God Who Also Guarded the Fields

Augustus gave Mars his grandest Roman temple under the title Mars Ultor, the Avenger, vowed on the battlefield at Philippi in 42 BCE where he defeated Caesar's assassins and dedicated only in 2 BCE, at the centre of his new Forum of Augustus. From that temple the standards recovered from the Parthians were displayed, and the Senate met there to debate questions of war and peace, making the Avenger's shrine as much a monument to Augustan foreign policy as to the god himself; it remains one of the best preserved of Rome's imperial forum temples.

The temple precinct also served a civic function beyond worship: provincial governors departing for their commands took their leave from its steps, and captured military standards, including those recovered from the Parthians in 20 BCE after the humiliation of Crassus's earlier defeat, were displayed inside. Augustus lined the flanking colonnades of his forum with statues of great Romans of the Republic, each captioned with a summary of his achievements, a gallery of exemplary ancestors that placed Augustus, and by extension the god of the temple at its centre, at the head of Rome's whole military tradition rather than merely its patron in war.