Mars: Roman God of War, Agriculture and the State

Mars was the Roman god of war. He was also a protector of farmland, crops and livestock, and a guardian of the Roman state. Roman legend made him the father of Romulus, the city’s founder, so the Romans counted themselves his descendants. A planet and a month still carry his name.

Who Was Mars?

Mars was one of the oldest and most important gods in Rome. With Jupiter and a god called Quirinus, he formed what historians call the Archaic Triad, the three gods at the centre of Rome’s earliest state religion. Each of the three had his own priest, known as a flamen, and the priest of Mars, the flamen Martialis, was one of the most senior religious officials in the city.

War, agriculture and the state belonged together in early Rome, a small community of farmers who also had to be soldiers. The men who ploughed the fields in spring took up their spears in summer to defend those fields from neighbours and raiders. Mars protected both the harvest and the borders.

Mars and Agriculture

The best evidence comes from Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman who wrote a practical handbook on farming in the second century BC. He records a prayer that a farmer should say to “Father Mars” while leading a pig, a sheep and a bull around the boundaries of his land before sacrificing them. The ceremony was the suovetaurilia, a name that combines the Latin words for the three animals. The prayer asked Mars to keep away disease, bad weather and disaster, and to let the crops, vines and livestock flourish.

One of the oldest surviving Latin texts, the hymn of the Arval Brethren, also calls on Mars. The Arval Brethren were a priesthood dedicated to the fertility of the fields, and the hymn’s words are so old that Romans of later centuries struggled to understand them.

Historians disagree about what this means. Some see Mars as a farming god in Rome’s earliest days. Others argue that he was a warrior from the start, and that farmers called on him as a fierce protector who would drive enemies, sickness and blight from their land.

Mars and Ares

The Romans identified Mars with Ares, the Greek god of war. As they encountered Greek culture, they matched their gods with Greek equivalents, and many Greek stories about Ares came to be told about Mars. The two gods had opposite reputations.

Ares was not popular in Greece. He stood for the brutal, chaotic side of war. In Homer’s Iliad, his own father Zeus tells him that he is the most hateful of all the gods on Olympus. The Greeks preferred Athena, who stood for strategy and discipline in warfare. Ares had relatively few temples, and poets often portrayed him as hot-headed and foolish.

The Romans honoured Mars as a father figure. He stood for courage, discipline and the strength that protected the community, and a state built on military success took pride in him.

Mars’s Family

The Greek tradition made Ares the son of Zeus and Hera, and the Romans accepted the equivalent parentage: Jupiter and Juno. The poet Ovid tells a different Roman story. Juno was upset that Jupiter had produced the goddess Minerva by himself, without her, so she decided to have a child without him. Flora, the goddess of flowers, gave her a magical bloom whose touch allowed her to conceive, and the child was Mars.

His partner in Roman religion was a goddess called Nerio, whose name seems to have meant something like “strength” or “valour”. Romans sometimes prayed to the pair together. Another war goddess, Bellona, is often linked with Mars too. Some later writers call her his wife, others his sister or companion, and Romans usually imagined her driving his chariot into battle. The ancient sources don’t agree.

Ovid also tells a comic tale about Mars in love. Mars asked an elderly goddess named Anna Perenna to help him win Minerva. Anna agreed, but on the wedding night Mars lifted the bride’s veil and found old Anna herself, laughing at him. The other gods found it hilarious.

Mars and Venus

The best-known love story about Mars comes from the Greeks, who told it about Ares and Aphrodite. In the Roman version, Mars had a secret affair with Venus, the goddess of love, who was married to Vulcan, the lame god of the forge. The Sun god spotted them and told Vulcan, who forged an invisible net of fine chains and fastened it over his bed. He caught the lovers together and called all the gods to come and see. The gods roared with laughter.

The Romans also gave the pairing a serious meaning. Venus was the mother of the Trojan hero Aeneas, ancestor of the Romans, and Mars was the father of Romulus, founder of the city. Between them, the god of war and the goddess of love were the divine parents of the Roman people, and artists often showed them together.

Father of Romulus and Remus

Long before Rome existed, a king named Numitor ruled the city of Alba Longa. His younger brother Amulius seized the throne. To make sure Numitor would have no heirs, Amulius forced Numitor’s daughter Rhea Silvia to become a Vestal Virgin, a priestess sworn to remain unmarried.

Rhea Silvia became pregnant and declared that the father was Mars. She gave birth to twin boys, Romulus and Remus. Amulius imprisoned her and ordered his servants to drown the babies in the River Tiber.

The servants could not bring themselves to throw the infants into the water. The river was in flood, so they left the twins in a basket at the water’s edge, expecting the current to carry them away. As the flood fell back, the basket came to rest on dry ground beneath a fig tree, near a cave later known as the Lupercal.

A she-wolf heard the babies crying and nursed them with her own milk. A woodpecker, known in Latin as picus, brought them food. Both animals were sacred to Mars. A shepherd named Faustulus later found the boys and raised them with his wife as his own sons. As adults, the twins overthrew Amulius, restored their grandfather to his throne and set out to found a city of their own. Remus died in a quarrel between them, and Romulus became the first king of Rome.

The Romans also told of a legendary early king of Latium called Picus. The sorceress Circe turned him into a woodpecker after he refused her love. Roman tradition linked the bird and the old king, and associated both with Mars.

The Romans believed that Romulus became a god called Quirinus when he died. Quirinus was therefore a separate god from Mars: a warlike one, and in this tradition his son.

Mars Through the Year

Mars’s festivals fell in March and October and marked the opening and closing of the military campaigning season. Early Rome fought its wars in the warmer months, when roads were passable and crops could feed armies. In March the army prepared; in October it came home and put its weapons away.

March takes its name from him, from the Latin Martius. It was originally the first month of the Roman year, and his rites filled it. There were horse races called the Equirria, and the Tubilustrium, the purification of the sacred war trumpets.

The Salii, the “leaping priests” of Mars, paraded through the city in old-fashioned military dress. They carried sacred shields, and they danced, leapt and beat the shields while chanting an ancient hymn. According to legend, a shield fell from the sky during the reign of King Numa as a gift from the gods, a sign that Rome would be safe for as long as the shield was. To stop anyone from stealing it, Numa had a craftsman make eleven perfect copies, so that no thief could tell which was the real one.

October closed the season. On 15 October the ceremony of the October Horse took place on the Campus Martius: after a race between two-horse chariots, the Romans sacrificed the right-hand horse of the winning team to Mars. On 19 October, at the Armilustrium, they purified the army’s weapons and stored them for the winter.

Mars and the Roman State

The Romans kept the sacred spears of Mars in the Regia, the ancient building in the Roman Forum associated with the city’s kings and later its chief priest. A report that the spears had moved on their own counted as a warning sign, and the Romans held special rituals to calm the gods. Before setting out on campaign, Roman generals are said to have shaken the spears and called on the god with the words Mars vigila, “Mars, wake up!”

The Campus Martius, the “Field of Mars”, lay just outside the old city boundary. Armed soldiers were traditionally not allowed inside that sacred boundary, so the army gathered, trained and was counted on the Campus. Over the centuries the Campus Martius filled with temples, theatres and public buildings, and much of modern central Rome stands on it.

Mars took on a new role under Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. After the assassination of Julius Caesar, the young Octavian (later Augustus) vowed to build a temple to Mars Ultor, “Mars the Avenger”, if he defeated Caesar’s killers. He dedicated the Temple of Mars Ultor in 2 BC as the centrepiece of the new Forum of Augustus. The temple became the place for awarding military honours, and young Roman men came there when they reached adulthood.

Romans honoured Mars under several titles. Mars Gradivus was “Mars who marches forth” into battle. Mars Pater was “Father Mars”, the protector of the community and its farms. Mars Ultor was the avenger who punished Rome’s enemies.

How Was Mars Depicted?

In Roman art, Mars usually appears as a strong, mature warrior. He wears a crested helmet, often of the Greek style, and carries a spear and shield. Some artists show him in full armour, others nearly naked in the heroic Greek fashion, with only his helmet and weapons to identify him.

His sacred animals were the wolf and the woodpecker, both of which appear in the story of Romulus and Remus. The bronze statue of the she-wolf nursing the twins, now in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, became one of the city’s best-known emblems.

Mars’s Name Today

The planet Mars: The fourth planet from the Sun shines red in the night sky, the colour of blood and fire, and ancient astronomers connected it with the god of war. Its two small moons were named in 1877 after Phobos and Deimos, “fear” and “dread”, the sons of Ares in Greek myth.

The month of March: The third month of the year still carries his name.

The days of the week: In French, Tuesday is mardi. In Spanish it’s martes, and in Italian martedì. All three come from the Latin dies Martis, “Mars’s day”. English Tuesday comes from Tiw, a Germanic god of war and justice whom people of the time saw as the equivalent of Mars.

Our language: The word “martial” comes from his name, as in martial arts, martial law and martial music. The old symbol for the male sex, a circle with an arrow pointing outwards, is traditionally explained as the shield and spear of Mars.

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