Deity

Mars

MARZ

Roman Deities

As the face of the planet Mars, the Roman Mars embodies drive, courage, and conflict. Mars is the Roman god of war and, in older layers of belief, a guardian of agriculture and the fields, a combination characteristic of early Rome. Second in importance only to Jupiter, he was the foremost god of the Roman army. By Rhea Silvia he was the father of Romulus and Remus, and so a father of the Roman people themselves. His festivals fell in March, the month named for him, which opened the campaigning season, and in October, which closed it. He is the counterpart of the Greek Ares, though far more honored and dignified. Sacred to him are the spear, the wolf, and the woodpecker, and he embodies martial drive, courage, and the vigor that both makes war and guards the land.

Facts

Function

Domain / Function

Agriculture and harvest 1

Domain / Function

War and battle 1

Belief

Theology

Polytheistic: many gods 2

Cult

Principal Cult Centre

The Campus Martius, and the temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus 1

Attributes and Iconography

In full armour with helmet, spear and shield; the wolf and the woodpecker. 1

Worship and Practice

The month of March, named for Mars, opened the Roman festival calendar with the Feriae Marti and the ritual dance of the Salii priests, who processed through the city bearing the sacred shields called ancilia while singing archaic hymns whose language even Roman antiquarians found difficult to understand. 2

Sources

Textual Note

Ovid's Fasti records that March, the month named for Mars, once opened the Roman calendar year, so that the god of war stood at the very start of Roman civic and religious time before a later calendar reform moved the year's beginning to January. 2

Attestation

Era of Attestation

600 BCE to 391 CE 1

Veneration Today

Historically attested; no continuous cult 1

Historicity

Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 2

Origins

Origin of the Name

The name Mars derives from the older Italic form Mavors, and he ranked second only to Jupiter in the Roman state cult. 2

Position Profile

Key Text

The Carmen Saliare, an archaic hymn sung by the Salian priests in Mars's honor, survives only in fragments quoted by later grammarians; its language was already so antiquated by the late Republic that even native Latin speakers such as Quintilian confessed they could barely understand it, making it one of the oldest surviving specimens of the Latin language. 1

Practice

Lineage

Roman tradition, as recorded by Ovid, holds that Mars was conceived by Juno alone, without Jupiter, using a magical flower given to her by Flora. 2

Attributions

Mythic Association

Roman tradition held that Mars fathered Romulus and Remus with the priestess Rhea Silvia, making him ancestor of the Roman people and founder, through his sons, of the city of Rome itself, a genealogical claim that elevated Mars from an earlier standing as a lesser agricultural deity into one of Rome's most important gods. 2

Identity

Gender

Male 1

History

Historical Note

Roman antiquarian tradition holds that Mars began as a guardian of fields and flocks, invoked to protect agriculture from blight and disease, with his standing as a god of war only later coming to dominate his public cult as Rome itself grew into a militarized state. 2

Life

Associated Relic

The sacred shields called the ancilia and the ceremonial spears kept in the Regia were treated as Mars's ritual relics in Rome, both ritually shaken by the Salian priests each March in a rite that formally opened the annual campaigning season for the Roman army. 2

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Not Merely a Roman Ares

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.

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.

Correspondences & Relations

Mars gave the red planet the name it keeps in nearly every European language. He was an agricultural as well as a war god in early Roman religion, so the purely martial reading of the planet is a later narrowing.

Connections

Addressed By

Carmen Saliare

Its own text: sung by "the Salii, the twelve leaping priests of Mars" during the rites marking the opening and closing of the campaigning season under his authority.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

Cato's Prayer to Mars

Explicitly addressed to Mars.

Source De Agri CulturaMarcus Porcius Cato

Associated With

Mysterium Cosmographicum

This source names Mars directly: "icosahedron, Earth, dodecahedron, Mars, tetrahedron, Jupiter, cube, Saturn."

Source Mysterium CosmographicumJohannes Kepler

Nodens

This source names Mars directly: "offerings identify him variously with Mars, Silvanus and Neptune, reflecting a god whose domain spanned the hunt, the wild and the healing power of water."

Source A Dictionary of Celtic MythologyJames MacKillop

Pallas

This source names Mars directly: "the search for a planet between Mars and Jupiter; like the other early asteroid signs it is an attribute emblem of the deity whose name the body carries, and its origin is documented."

Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion

Pisces Fifth Term: Saturn

This source names Mars directly: "run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."