Rome's war god Mars also guarded farms and was honoured as a father
Greeks often treated Ares with disgust, but Romans revered his counterpart Mars as father of their people, guardian of crops and a force that won peace through strength. His festivals clustered in March and October, bracketing both the fighting season and the farming year, and his name lives on in martial and Martin.
Mars, son of Jupiter and Juno, stood first among the Roman army's gods while also protecting agriculture, a pairing typical of early Rome. March, originally the first month of the Roman year, bears his name. Greek influence led Romans to equate him with Ares and retell Ares' myths under his name, yet his character stayed very different: where Ares meant chaos and ruin, Mars stood for military might used to secure order.
He anchors Rome's founding legend. He fathered the twins Romulus and Remus on Rhea Silvia, by force in the story, and his sacred animal, the wolf, suckled them. His affair with Venus, mother of Aeneas, stitched together two separate founding traditions. His altar on the Campus Martius was credited to Numa, Rome's peaceable second king, and became a hub of elections in the Republic. Augustus moved the cult inside the sacred boundary, building a temple to Mars Ultor, the Avenger, in his new forum.
Ovid, alone among sources, tells a stranger birth story in his calendar poem, the Fasti. Jealous that Jupiter had produced Minerva from his own head, Juno asked Flora for help, and a touch of a magic flower made her pregnant without a partner. That may explain why the Matronalia, a festival of married women honouring Juno, fell on 1 March, marked in one late calendar as Mars's birthday. His consort was Nerio, whose name meant valour and was thought to be Sabine.
The name's roots are tangled. Old Latin had Mavors, and Oscan Mamers. An older theory linking Mars to the Vedic storm gods, the Maruts, has been abandoned; the earliest Latin form may be foreign, perhaps from Maris, an Etruscan child-god, though that is disputed. Some scholars think he began as a thunder god descended from Proto-Indo-European Perkwunos.
Source: Mars (mythology)
