In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Mars (, )Chapter 3, Charles E. Bennett (1907) The Latin Language – a historical outline of its sounds, inflections, and syntax. Allyn & Bacon, Boston. is the god of war and also an agricultural guardian, a combination characteristic of early Rome.Mary Beard, J.A. North, and S.R.F. Price, Religions of Rome: A History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 47–48. He is the son of Jupiter and Juno, and was pre-eminent among the Roman army's military gods. Most of his festivals were held in March, the month named for him (Latin Martius), and in October, the months which traditionally began and ended the season for both military campaigning and farming.John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion, translated by Janet Lloyd (Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 51–52; Robert Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome (Routledge, 2001; originally published in French 1998), p. 79.
Under the influence of Greek culture, Mars was identified with the Greek god Ares,Larousse Desk Reference Encyclopedia, The Book People, Haydock, 1995, p. 215. whose myths were reinterpreted in Roman literature and art under the name of Mars. The character and dignity of Mars differs in fundamental ways from that of his Greek counterpart, who is often treated with contempt and revulsion in Greek literature.Kurt A. Raaflaub, War and Peace in the Ancient World (Blackwell, 2007), p. 15. Mars's altar in the Campus Martius, the area of Rome that took its name from him, was supposed to have been dedicated by Numa, the peace-loving semi-legendary second king of Rome; in Republican times it was a focus of electoral activities. Augustus shifted the focus of Mars's cult to within the pomerium (Rome's ritual boundary), and built a temple to Mars Ultor as a key religious feature of his new forum.Paul Rehak and John G. Younger, Imperium and Cosmos: Augustus and the Northern Campus Martius (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 11–12.
Unlike Ares, who was viewed primarily as a destructive and destabilizing force, Mars represented military power as a way to secure peace, and was a father (pater) of the Roman people.Isidore of Seville calls Mars Romanae gentis auctorem, the originator or founder of the Roman people as a gens (Etymologiae 5.33.5). In Rome's mythic genealogy and founding, Mars fathered Romulus and Remus through his rape of Rhea Silvia. The wolf was the sacred animal of Mars, with the she-wolf nursing the two founders as children. His love affair with Venus symbolically reconciled two different traditions of Rome's founding; Venus was the divine mother of the hero Aeneas, credited by Vergil as an earlier founder of Rome.
Name The word (genitive ),The classical Latin declension of the name is as follows: nominative and vocative case, Mars; genitive, Martis; accusative, Martem; dative, Marti; ablative Marte. which in Old Latin and poetic usage also appears as (),Virgil, Aeneid VIII, 630 is cognate with Oscan (). In older literature, the god Mars was equated with the Vedic storm deities known as the Maruts, both of which were traditionally unified under a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European term . However, this etymology is now rejected in more modern Indo-Europeanist scholarship. The oldest recorded Latin form, Mamart-, is likely of foreign origin.Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Brill, 2008, p. 366. It has been explained as deriving from Maris, the name of an Etruscan child-god, though this is not universally agreed upon.Larissa Bonfante, Etruscan Life and Afterlife: A Handbook of Etruscan Studies (Wayne State University Press, 1986), p. 226. Scholars have varying views on whether the two gods are related, and if so how. Latin adjectives from the name of Mars are and , meaning "of Mars" or "warlike" from which derive the English term "martial" (as in "martial arts" or "martial law") and personal names such as "Marcus", "Mark" and "Martin".Albert Dauzat, Dictionnaire étymologique des noms de famille et prénoms de France, Larousse, Paris 1980. p. 420. New completed edition by Marie-Thérèse Morlet.
Mars may ultimately be a thematic reflex of the Proto-Indo-European god Perkwunos, having originally been a thunderer character.York, Michael. Romulus and Remus, Mars and Quirinus. Journal of Indo-European Studies 16:1 & 2 (Spring/Summer, 1988), 153–172.
Birth Like Ares who was the son of Zeus and Hera,Hesiod, Theogony p. 79 in the translation of Norman O. Brown (Bobbs-Merrill, 1953); 921 in the Loeb Classical Library numbering; Iliad, 5.890–896. Mars is usually considered to be the son of Jupiter and Juno. In Ovid's version of Mars's origin, he was the son of Juno alone. Jupiter had usurped the role of mother when he gave birth to Minerva directly from his forehead (or mind) without a female partner. Juno sought the advice of the goddess Flora on how in turn to produce a child without male intervention. Flora obtained a magic flower (Latin flos, plural flores, a masculine word) and tested it on a heifer who became fecund at once. Flora ritually plucked a flower, using her thumb, touched Juno's belly, and impregnated her. Juno withdrew to Thrace and the shore of Marmara for the birth.Ovid, Fasti 5.229–260
Ovid tells this story in the Fasti, his long-form poetic work on the Roman calendar. It may explain why the Matronalia, a festival celebrated by married women in honor of Juno as a goddess of childbirth, occurred on the first day of Mars's month, which is also marked on a calendar from late antiquity as the birthday of Mars. In the earliest Roman calendar, March was the first month, and the god would have been born with the new year.William Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London, 1908), p. 35f., discusses this interpretation to question it. Ovid is the only source for the story. He may be presenting a literary myth of his own invention, or an otherwise unknown archaic Italic tradition; either way, in choosing to include the story, he emphasizes that Mars was connected to plant life and was not alienated from female nurture.Carole E. Newlands, Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 105–106.
Consort The consort of Mars was Nerio or Neriene, meaning "Valor". She represents the vital force (), power () and majesty () of Mars.Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.23. Gellius says the word Nerio or Nerienes is Sabine and is supposed to be the origin of the name Nero as used by the Claudian family, who were Sabine in origin. The Sabines themselves, Gellius says, thought the word was Greek in origin, from νεῦρα (neura), Latin nervi, meaning the sinews and ligaments of the limbs. Her name was regarded as Sabine in origin and is equivalent to Latin virtus, "manly virtue" (from , "man").Robert E.A. Palmer, The Archaic Community of the Romans (Cambridge University Press, 1970, 2009), p. 167. In the early 3rd century BCE, the comic playwright Plautus has a reference to Mars greeting Nerio, his wife.Plautus, Truculentus 515. A source from late antiquity says that Mars and Neriene were celebrated together at a festival held on March 23.Johannes Lydus, De mensibus 4.60 (42). In the later Roman Empire, Neriene came to be identified with Minerva.Porphyrion, Commentum in Horatium Flaccum, on Epistula II.2.209.
Nerio probably originates as a divine personification of Mars's power, as such abstractions in Latin are generally feminine. Her name appears with that of Mars in an archaic prayer invoking a series of abstract qualities, each paired with the name of a deity. The influence of Greek mythology and its anthropomorphic gods may have caused Roman writers to treat these pairs as "marriages."William Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London, 1922), p. 150–154; Roger D. Woodard, Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult (University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 113–114; Gary Forsythe, A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (University of California Press, 2005), p. 145. The prayer is recorded in the passage on Nerio in Aulus Gellius.
Venus and Mars
The union of Venus and Mars held greater appeal for poets and philosophers, and the couple were a frequent subject of art. In Greek myth, the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite had been exposed to ridicule when her husband Hephaestus (whose Roman equivalent was Vulcan) caught them in the act by means of a magical snare. Although not originally part of the Roman tradition, in 217 BCE Venus and Mars were presented as a complementary pair in the lectisternium, a public banquet at which images of twelve major gods of the Roman state were presented on couches as if present and participating.
Scenes of Venus and Mars in Roman art often ignore the adulterous implications of their union, and take pleasure in the good-looking couple attended by Cupid or multiple Loves (). Some scenes may imply marriage,John R. Clarke, The Houses of Roman Italy, 100 B.C.–A.D. 250: Ritual, Space, and Decoration (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 156–157 and the relationship was romanticized in funerary or domestic art in which husbands and wives had themselves portrayed as the passionate divine couple.Laura Salah Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 284–287. The uniting of deities representing Love and War lent itself to allegory, especially since the lovers were the parents of Concordia. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino notes that "only Venus dominates Mars, and he never dominates her".Ficino, On Love, speech 5, chapter 8, as summarized in the entry on "Mars", The Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 564. In ancient Roman and Renaissance art, Mars is often shown disarmed and relaxed, or even sleeping, but the extramarital nature of their affair can also suggest that this peace is impermanent.Entry on "Mars" in The Classical Tradition, p. 564.
Essential nature
War