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Iuppiter might help at need in averting defeat and awarding victory, but it was with Mars that the general conduct of war rested. Hardly any god in the state-cult has his character so clearly marked, and we may regard Mars as a deity who, taking on new functions to suit the needs of the times, almost entirely lost the traces of his original nature.
=Ianus.= We left Ianus as the numen of the house-door: he passes into the state exactly in the same capacity: the state too has its 'door, the gate at the north-east corner of the Forum, and this becomes the seat of his state-cult the door which, according to Augustan legend, is opened in the time of war and only shut when Rome is at peace with all the world.
Thus at the command of the books Pluto and Persephone were received into the state-cult, though the strangeness of the situation was acknowledged, at least in so far that they translated Pluto into the Latin Dis; Persephone to be sure was left alone, or more strictly speaking was accommodated to the Latin tongue by being changed to Proserpina.
The importation of grain from Cumae meant more to Rome than the mere satisfaction of her physical needs; it meant much more than the addition of three deities to her state-cult, for the grain thus imported was carried from Cumae to Ostia by sea and so up the Tiber to Rome, and the whole matter therefore marks one of the important steps in Rome's interest in commerce generally but especially in ocean commerce.
Yet it was not the introduction of her worship as an ordinary state-cult, for then she would have been taken inside the pomerium with far greater right than Hercules and Castor were.
=Mars.= We have seen reason to believe that in the earlier stages of Roman religion Mars was a numen of vegetation, but though the Ambarvalia was duly taken over into the state-cult and attained a very high degree of importance, yet there can be no doubt that in the state-religion Mars was pre-eminently associated with war.
Thus Mercury was received into the state-cult at about the time when the grain trade began, and was, as it were, the divine representative of the interest which the Roman state took in the whole transaction. His temple was outside the pomerium on the Aventine side of the Circus Maximus.
The domestic worship is not wholly distinguishable from that of the fields, the state-cult is, as we have seen, very largely a replica of the other two. The evidence for the domestic and agricultural cults is in itself very scanty, and we shall frequently have to draw inferences from their counterparts in the state.
When we have looked at the companion picture of the farmer in the fields, we shall go on to see how the worship of the agricultural household is the prototype and basis of the state-cult, but first we must consider briefly the very difficult question of the relation of the living to the dead.
The ultimate result of this movement was the introduction of the goddess Diana into the state-cult of Rome, where she was subsequently identified with Apollo's sister Artemis. But this is a long story, and to understand it we must go back some distance to make our beginning.
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