C. M. C. Green Mars as a Hunter and Ephebic God
 
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the proposition, originally offered by H. S. Versnel (Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion II, Leiden, 1993), that Mars was an ephebic god. Although Mars is known as the quintessential Roman warrior, Cato the Elder (Agr. 141) directs farmers to pray to Mars for purification of their fields, for successful yields, and for protection from disease for their crops, flocks, and household–very unwarlike responsibilities for this deity. Wissowa’s assertion, against suggestions that Mars was a sun god or a vegetation god, that he was never anything other than a war god (Religion und Kultus der Römer, München, 1912, 143) prevailed in scholarly opinion. When he turned to the question, Versnel made a structural comparison between Mars and Apollo, which led him to postulate that Mars was an ephebic god. The weakness of his argument was Mars’ appearance: a most un-Apollonian war god. In this paper I will propose that the resolution to both contradictions lies in recognizing that Mars was originally a hunter-warrior god, and that the warrior-god image is an extension, not a contradiction to this.

Hunting is wholly intertwined with warfare in early Greek and Roman societies, a fact that is well known for the Greeks, but less so for the Romans. That Mars has not been thought of as a hunting-god is due, first , to his seemingly firm identification with Ares, the warrior par excellence. Yet Cato’s prayer has always challenged the Ares identification, and has remained the single most unreconcilable aspect of the known cultic practice concerning Mars. Yet, if Mars is a hunter-god, Cato’s important testimony to Mars’ cult begins to make sense. Besides asking Mars to keep away sickness barrenness and destruction, ruin and unseasonable influence (141.2), the farmer must also ask him to permit good harvests and flourishing crops, and to bestow good health (141.3). These functions are often associated with hunting gods, such as Apollo in Greece, and Diana in Italy, who are closely associated with protection from (and, when angered, the infliction of) disease and pestilence, besides being healers and purifiers of the fields, flocks and family. Another of Cato’s prayers, to Mars Silvanus (Agr. 83) specifically for the health and protection of cattle confirms the identification, without question, of Mars as a hunting god. The sacrifice is made in the forest, and the epithet "Silvanus" clearly marks him as a divinity of the woods. As a hunter he protects cattle because hunters ward off predators, like the wolf, that dwell in the forest.

The function of hunting as a part of ephebic initiation has been well analysed (P. Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter, 1986, ch. 5). Thus, the single major objection to Versnel’s thesis, that Mars functioned as an ephebic god –that Mars is incompatible with Apollo–has been removed, and the similarity between the two becomes evident. When the hunting aspect of Mars’s function is acknowledged, the images of Mars as warrior, as protector of flocks, as preventer of disease, and even as Versnel’s ephebic god, all combine to form a coherent portrait, one that is soundly based in cultic practice.