ilt to Mars under this cognomen was
vowed by Augustus "in behalf of vengeance for his father," in the war
against the slayers of Caesar, Brutus and Cassius. This temple, vowed at
Philippi in B.C. 42, was so slow in building that in the meantime
Augustus erected a small round temple to Mars Ultor on the Capitoline.
This was dedicated May 12, B.C. 20. In the years which followed Augustus
proceeded with the difficult and extremely expensive task of purchasing
property for his own Forum, and here was built and dedicated, August 1,
B.C. 2, the great temple of Mars Ultor. But aside from being a very
present reminder of the vengeance which the gods had in store for those
who killed a Caesar, it stood also for the Julian house, for Mars was
not alone in the temple but with him was Venus, the ancestral mother of
the family of Julius and Augustus; and thus was once more emphasised the
connexion between the ancestors of the ruling house and the great
ancestor Mars, from whom all Romans were sprung.

A temple possessed of such strong associations with the imperial family
became instantly a centre of their family worship, and in this respect
produced another rival to the cult of Juppiter on the Capitoline. In
connexion namely with the putting on of the _toga virilis_ the members
of the imperial family went to the temple of Mars Ultor instead of
following the immemorial custom of ascending the Capitol to the shrine
of Juppiter Optimus Maximus. More important yet the insignia of the
triumph, which had always been in the keeping of the Capitoline Juppiter
even before he was Optimus Maximus and while he was only the "Striker,"
Feretrius, were now preserved in the temple of Mars Ultor.

With all the state worshipping Apollo, the god of the emperor's own
family, on the Palatine, celebrating the divinity of his ancestor the
god Julius in the Roman Forum, and acknowledging Mars as the avenger of
all those who did the emperor harm, in the emperor's own new Forum, it
might have seemed to a less far-seeing man that religion had been
sufficiently pressed into the service of the royal family. But so it did
not seem to Augustus. These cults were all three of them essentially
new, and new cults may, to be sure, easily become prominent; they
usually do, but the test comes with time whether there is external
pressure sufficiently continuous to give permanency to this prominence.
As a matter of fact not one of these three cults continued later to hol