We can learn little or nothing from the calendar of this month about the origin of Mars, and we have no other sufficient evidence on which to base a satisfactory conjecture. But from the cults of the month, and partly also from those of October, we can see pretty clearly what ideas were prominent in his worship even in the early days of the Roman state. They were chiefly two, and the two were closely connected. He was the Power who must be specially invoked to procure the safety of crops and cattle; and secondly, in his keeping were the safety and success of the freshly-enrolled host with its armour and its trumpets. In short, he was that deity to whom the most ancient Romans looked for aid at the season when all living things, man included, broke into fresh activity. He represents the characteristics of the early Roman more exactly than any other god; for there are two things which we may believe with certainty about the Roman people in the earliest times—(1) that their life and habits of thought were those of an agricultural race; and (2) that they continually increased their cultivable land by taking forcible possession in war of that of their neighbours. Footnote 61: See Nissen, _Italienische Landeskunde_, i. 404; Ovid, _Fasti_, 3. 235— Quid, quod hiems adoperta gelu tunc denique cedit, Et pereunt victae sole tepente nives, Arboribus redeunt detonsae frigore frondes, Uvidaque in tenero palmite gemma tumet: Quaeque diu latuit, nunc se qua tollat in auras, Fertilis occultas invenit herba vias. Nunc fecundus ager: pecoris nunc hora creandi, Nunc avis in ramo tecta laremque parat. Tempora iure colunt Latiae fecunda parentes Quarum militiam votaque partus habet. Here we have the fertility of man, beast, and crop, all brought together: the poet is writing of March 1. The Romans reckoned spring from Favonius (Feb. 7) to about May 10 (Varro, _R. R._ 1. 38); March 1 would therefore usually be a day on which its first effects would be obvious to every one. Footnote 62: Sat. 1. 12. 6; Ovid, _Fasti_, 3. 135 foll. Footnote 63: Ovid only mentions one ‘curia’: in Macrobius the word is in the plural. Ovid must, I think, refer to the curia Saliorum on the Palatine (Marq. 431), as this was the day on which the Salii began their rites. Macrobius may be including the curia of the Quirinal Salii (Preller, i. 357). Footnote 64: See below, on the Vestalia in June, p. 147. Footnote 65: Julius Obsequens, 19. Footnote 66: