Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/598

Rh 570 M A K M A R the rain. In cases of drougnt the lapis manalis, which was kept iti his temple on the Appian Way, was carried through the city by the pontijices. The first month of the old Roman year was the month of Mars, still called March. On the first day the god had been born ; and on the same day various annual ceremonies both political and religious took place ; and the holy fire was renewed in the temple of Vesta. When Mamurius Veturius, i.e., Mars of the Year (vetus, Greek feros), was beaten out of the city on March 14, the intention was originally to symbolize the driving away of the old year. The spear sacred to Mars was in its original sense doubtless the lightning, and his sacred shield was, like the segis of Zeus and Athene, the storm shield, i.e., the thundercloud. The Sabine words Marmar and Mamers (akin to fj-ap^aipw) are evidently names of the heaven-god. The wolf which was sacred to Mars may be compared with the -wolves of Zeus Lycaios, and the horse, the sacrifice of Mars, is the horse of the sun, which the Greeks also sacrificed to Helios. As heaven-god and sender of rain, Mars is the giver of fertility and increase. Hence in some of the oldest cults he is the god of the land, of agriculture, and of the flocks. As he was powerful to send fertility, so he could cause also drought, sterility, and all evil ; and propitiatory ceremonies, such as the Ambarvalia, were consecrated to him. The Arval brothers invoked Mars to assist them and to avert pestilence. In the Robigalia a sheep and a reddish dog were sacrificed by the flamen of Mars to avert mildew from the crops. The sacrifice of the &quot; October horse &quot; in the Campus Martius, whose head the people of the Subura and the Sacra Via struggled for in order to hang it up in their own precincts, had also a naturalistic and apotropaic character. In times of calamity there was an old Italian custom of dedicating to Mars a ver sacrum. Everything born in this spring was the property of the god ; the animals were sacrificed, the young men when they grew up were sent out of the country. Mars seems also to have had some relation to the religious ceremony of marriage. Along with Juno, the goddess of women and of childbirth, he was worshipped by the Roman matrons on June 1 and at the Matronalia on March 1. As god of the land and giver of increase, Mars was also the god of death and the dead ; he was one of the deities invoked by Decius when devoting himself to death. He was likewise the giver of oracles: like Zeus he revealed his will to men by certain signs. His ancient oracle at Tiora Matiene near Crere resembled in character the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, in so far as revelation took place by the medium of sacred birds and trees. Woodpeckers were the sacred birds of Mars, and the noise which they made tapping on the trees was one of the simplest methods of revelation. Picus, the woodpecker, was a name or form of Mars, and was ulti mately individualized as a local hero, an early king of Latium, and son of the god. Faunus, the favouring deity, son of. Picus, is pre-eminently the god of prophecy; he also is closely related to the original Italian character of Mar.-;, which he retained far more truly than the great Roman god. Although the worship of Mars was known both in Latium and in Etruria, it was probably of Sabine origin. Quirinus, an undoubtedly Sabine word, is merely a name of Mars, which never acquired complete individuality; the feeling always remained alive in Rome that Mars and Quirinus were one, although they had separate priests. It is in accordance with the Sabine character that the warlike element should have been very strong in their conception of deity ; a/id thus the Sabine Mars became in the Roman pantheon the deity of war. Besides the ceremonies round the altar of Mars in the Campus Martius, the oldest cults of the god in Rome are the Sabine worship of Quirinus on the Quirinal and the Latin worship of the holy spear of Mars in the temple of Vesta. There likewise grew at an early time a cultus of the god on the Palatine, said to have been founded by ISTuma, and twelve Salii of the Palatine existed alongside of the twelve Quirinal Salii, The Palatine Salii performed one of the most remarkable ceremonies in the Roman worship of Mars. For many days, beginning from March 1, they danced in armour through certain parts of the city, clashing their lances on their shields, and repeated the prescribed song. The shields which they carried were the twelve sacred ancilia preserved on the Palatine. One of these, it was said, fell from heaven in the time of Numa, and the king, in order to preserve safely this pledge of victory for the state, had eleven others exactly like it made by Mamurius Veturius. The song of the Salii, besides mentioning all the gods of the city, referred to Mamurius, whose name is only a form of Mamers Next to Jupiter, Mars was the chief protecting god of the Roman state. Quirinus Mars was the father of the twin-founders of the city, and his sacred wolf was the emblem of the city and the foster-mother of the twins. The Campus Martius outside the city was dedicated to the god from a very early time ; there the young men practised their warlike exercises ; there the horse races, equiria, in honour of Mars (February 27) and the sacrifice of the &quot;October horse&quot; took place. There also was held the census every fifth year, followed by the purificatory cere monial for the whole city, which was dedicated to Mars. When war broke out, the Roman general clashed the shield and spear in the temple of Mars and invoked the god ; the spoils of victory belonged to him after Jupiter Feretrius. There was an ancient temple of Mars outside the Porta Capena on the Appian Way ; and on the ides of July, in commemoration of the battle of Lake Regillus, the knights had a procession &quot; From Castor in the Forum, To Mars without the wall.&quot; As the god of war, who marched with his people to battle, Mars .was Gradivus; such at least was the later explanation of an old religious name. Inuus Lupercus, the averter, to whom the Lupercalia was dedicated, was prob ably a local form of Mars ; his character as protector of the Palatine city, and the warlike element in him, resemble Mars (see LUPERCALIA). Silvanus is also closely related to the agricultural god Mars, who is sometimes called Mar? Silvanus. A goddess named Nerio or Neriene is sometimes mentioned as wife of Mars. There was also a goddess Bellona, whose name marks her strictly as the goddess of war ; she is called the sister or daughter or wife of Mars. Quirinus, on the Quirinal, had a festival called Quirinalia, on the 17th of February. See Preller, Rom, Mytliol., and the other books on Roman religion; Marquardt on religious antiquities ; Unger, &quot; Lupercalia, ; Rhein. Mus., 1881; Jordan, Stadt Rom; Roscher, Apollo und Mars ; and on the Etruscan Mars, Miiller, Etruskcr, ed. Deecke, ii. 57 and 169. MARSALA, a seaport on the west coast of Sicily, m the province of Trapani, 20 miles south of Trapani, to the north of the river Marsala, with a station on the railway between Trapani and Palermo. A flourishing and well- built town, with wide paved streets, it possesses a castle, a cathedral, a theatre, cavalry barracks (now occupied by Government offices), an academy of science and literature, and a public library. The Corinthian columns of the cathedral were originally intended for the cathedral at Carterbury, and owe their present destination to the wreck of the vessel which was conveying them to England. After the destruction of its harbour in the latter part of the 16th century as a precaution against its occupation by