it is tempting to see, as we can see nowhere else in the Roman religion, faint traces of a feeling about the heaven-god brought from a remote pastoral life under the open sky, where neither forest nor mountain intervened to shelter man from the great Presence;[265] and it is also tempting to think that there was here, even for Latins who had learnt to worship Jupiter under the form of stocks and stones in the land of their final settlement, some chance of the development of a deity "making for righteousness." Third and fourth in the order of invocation came Mars and Quirinus, and the same order held good for their flamines. These two priests may have been subject to some of the taboos which restricted the Flamen Dialis;[266] they too, that is, may have been to some extent precious, and have been endowed in a lost period of history with magical powers; but if so, the memory and importance of such disabilities was rapidly forgotten in the City-state, and they were early allowed to fill civil offices, a privilege which the Dialis did not attain till the second century B.C.[267] Of the sacrificial duties of the Martialis we know nothing for certain, and can get no help from him as to the ideas of the early Romans about their great deity Mars. Mars is in some ways the most interesting of all the Roman deities; but except as the familiar war-god of Roman history he remains a somewhat doubtful conception. Like Jupiter and Janus he has attained to a real name; but of that name, which in various forms is still so often on our lips, no convincing account has ever been given. Comparative mythology used to be much occupied with him, and he has been compared with Indra, Apollo, Odin, and others. But as M. Reinach said, it is time to attend more closely to differences; and Mars seems to stand best by himself, as a genuine Italian religious conception. His name is found all over ancient Italy in various forms--Mavors, Mamers, Marmor, and as Cerfus Martius at Iguvium. His wild and warlike character, his association with the wolf and the spear, seem to suggest the struggle for existence that must have gone on among the tribes that pushed down into a peninsula of rugged mountain and dense forest, abounding with the wolves which are not yet wholly extinct there. Whether or no his antecedents are to be found in other lands, we shall not be far wrong in assuming that the Roman Mars was the product of life and experience in Italy, and Italy only.