ngly every "-ver sacrum-" setting out to found a new
community marched under the protection of its own Mars. To Mars
was dedicated the first month not only in the Roman calendar of
the months, which in no other instance takes notice of the gods,
but also probably in all the other Latin and Sabellian calendars:
among the Roman proper names, which in like manner contain no allusion
to any gods, Marcus, Mamercus, and Mamurius appear in prevailing
use from very early times; with Mars and his sacred woodpecker was
connected the oldest Italian prophecy; the wolf, the animal sacred
to Mars, was the badge of the Roman burgesses, and such sacred
national legends as the Roman imagination was able to produce
referred exclusively to the god Mars and to his duplicate Quirinus.
In the list of festivals certainly Father Diovis--a purer and
more civil than military reflection of the character of the Roman
community--occupies a larger space than Mars, just as the priest
of Jupiter has precedence over the two priests of the god of war;
but the latter still plays a very prominent part in the list, and
it is even quite likely that, when this arrangement of festivals
was established, Jovis stood by the side of Mars like Ahuramazda
by the side of Mithra, and that the worship of the warlike Roman
community still really centred at this time in the martial god of
death and his March festival, while it was not the "care-destroyer"
afterwards introduced by the Greeks, but Father Jovis himself, who
was regarded as the god of the heart-gladdening wine.

Nature of the Roman Gods

It is no part of our present task to consider the Roman deities in
detail; but it is important, even in an historical point of view,
to call attention to the peculiar character at once of shallowness
and of fervour that marked the Roman faith. Abstraction
and personification lay at the root of the Roman as well as of
the Hellenic mythology: the Hellenic as well as the Roman god was
originally suggested by some natural phenomenon or some mental
conception, and to the Roman just as to the Greek every divinity
appeared a person. This is evident from their apprehending the
individual gods as male or female; from their style of appeal to
an unknown deity,--"Be thou god or goddess, man or woman;" and from
the deeply cherished belief that the name of the proper tutelary
spirit of the community ought to remain for ever unpronounced, lest
an enemy should come to learn it a