iving at Athens, salutes his sweetheart
with the words "Mars peregre adveniens salutat Nerienen uxorem
suam"--words which Plautus must have adapted from his Greek original in
such a way as to make them intelligible to a Roman audience. Gellius
says that he had often heard a learned friend blame Plautus for thus
putting a false notion about Mars (that he had a wife) into the mouth of
his soldier--"nimis comice"--merely to produce a comic effect. But, he
adds, there was some justification for it; for if you read the third
book of the annals of Gellius (a namesake who lived in the second
century B.C.) you will find that he puts into the mouth of Hersilia,
pleading for peace before Ti. Tatius, words which actually make Nerio
the wife of Mars: "De tui, inquit, coniugis consilio, Martem scilicet
significans." Little, I fear, can be said to the credit of this
Gellius;[307] he lived in an age when annalists were many and inventive,
and long after the Romans had grown accustomed to Greek ideas of the
gods; but we may take this passage as evidence of what may have been in
his day a popular idea of Mars and his consort. Lastly, Aulus Gellius
quotes a brace of lines from one Licinius Imbrex, an old comic writer of
the same century, who, in a _fabula palliata_ called Neaera, wrote:--

nolo ego Neaeram te vocent, aut Nerienem,
cum quidem Marti es in connubium data.

The real question is whether these passages from comic writers and an
annalist of no reputation combine to prove that there was an ancient
popular idea of Mars as a married god; as to the priestly view of the
matter they can, of course, prove nothing. It seems to me that Dr.
Frazer is entitled to argue that in the second century B.C. such a
popular idea existed,[308] which the Roman state religion did not
recognise, and which Aulus Gellius, as we have seen, could not agree
with. I do not, however, think him entitled to go farther, and to infer
that this was an idea of divinity native to Italy or of very old
standing. Is it not much simpler to suppose, with a cool-headed scholar
whom Dr. Frazer is willing to follow when it suits his turn, that pairs
or conjunctions of this kind, the true meaning of which I hope to
explain directly, were easily mistaken by the vulgar mind for married
god and goddess?[309] In those degenerate days of the Roman religion,
after the war with Hannibal, to which these writers belong--and all are
later than Ennius, the first to make mischief