ProQuest Dissertations - Historia Antigua

Moreover, because the worship of Hercules was so diverse in the colonies, it could nothave begun and ended with Hercules as a colonizing god nor as a Roman imposition.Clearly, the worship of Hercules was shaped by the needs and choices of the local andcolonial populations.MarsAlong with Hercules as colonizer, Mars was another god that had a link with themovement of Italian populations through his role in the Sabellic ver sacrum. UnlikeHercules, however, evidence of the worship of Mars is scarce in the colonies of themiddle Republic. Small bronze figurines, similar to those of Hercules discussed above(pp. 224-225) mark archaic worship of the warlike god. We also have his name ininscriptions dating to the third century BCE. The following section compares the archaicrole of Mars with the evidence for later cults in order to see if there is any connectionbetween Mars as colonizer and the Latin and Roman colonies of the middle Republic.Although a ver sacrum was vowed to Jupiter in Rome in 217 BCE, the custom haslegendary origins with the Sabines. 101The Sabellic ver sacrum involved sacrificing all ofthe fruits of the spring to a god, usually Mars, and sending the children born that year to acolony after they had reached the age of majority. 102Strabo (5.4.12) outlines the process:Prosdocimi (1989), pp. 528-529. For the Roman ver sacrum see Heurgon (1957) Chapter 3: "Le 'VerSacrum' Romain de 217," pp. 36-51.102 Prosdocimi (1989), p. 528 argues that the ver sacrum was not a factual reality but an idealized reality orideology of a reality. One of the reasons he cites is that the animals born in the year of the vow would havebeen too old to go to the colony with the humans. I think he overlooks the sacrifice of the animals, whichoccurred the year after the vow, or in the case of the Roman ver sacrum, the year after the conditions of thevow were fulfilled.219