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I'm doing an important project on Mars.

Where did Mars live?

Did the god dwell in a distinct place from his fellow deities?

Harel13
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TJohnson
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The first cult centre for Mars in Rome was the Altar of Mars on the Campus Martius, or Field of Mars. The other main temple of Mars lay outside the city boundary, built to fufill a vow made during the war against the Gauls. This link lists the main Roman temples of Mars.
Hope this helps.

solsdottir
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They lived on Mount Olympus.

From answer linked.

[205] O magne Olympi rector et mundi arbiter,
Jam statue tandem gravibus aerumnis modum

O mighty ruler of Olympus, judge of all the world,
set now at length a limit to our crushing cares, an end to our disasters.

That was from a play, in which it states that Olympus is where all of the Roman gods lived.

So Mars lived on Mount Olympus.

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bleh
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The most explicit reference to a residence of Mars in a Roman mythological text describes the god as dwelling, not in Rome, but in a forbidding iron palace on the slopes of Mt Haemus in Thrace, which is now known as the Balkan Mountains; these stretch across the entire latitudinal width of Bulgaria into the eastern edge of Serbia.

This comes from a detailed and extremely dramatic scene at the beginning of Book 7 of Statius' Thebaid (Lines 1-77), in which Jupiter, the king of the gods, has sent the herald-god Mercury to Thrace with a message for Mars regarding the military attack of the Seven Against Thebes back in Greece.

Deep in the mountain forests, and haunted by throngs of war-daemons, battle-spirits, and personifications of fear, rage, death and violence, the picture that Statius's epic poem paints of the edifice is rather akin to some modern gothic renditions of a gory vampire castle. This comes complete with (apparently living?) depictions of the human suffering caused by war, such as "faces ground by chariot-wheels" whose groaning voices are audible(!), amidst "fragments of iron-wrought gates and the keels of warships" embedded into the heights of the building's façade.

Here, even the Sun's rays grow weak since "the very light fears that dwelling| And a harsh glare dulls the stars". Meanwhile the only fires found here have been "snatched from burning cities" in order to illuminate altars bespattered with blood from battlefields. These gruesome features seem to be supplied by the war-god himself, who, in this scene, comes rolling onto the premises in a chariot which streaks the entire landscape with gore, and trailing behind him "spoils and weeping throngs" as "forest and deep snows give him room".

According to A.S. Kline's 2013 translation of Lines 41-42, this was "the god’s savage| Home, surrounded by a thousand Frenzies." Domus is the Latin word rendered here as "Home," and which John Henry Mozley's version (1928) has as "mansion". Statius closes the main description of the location (at Lines 60-63) with an allusion to the passage of Homer's poetry that inspires this idea, whereat (Odyssey 8.256-369) Ares, the Greek version of Mars, is literally netted committing adultery with Aphrodite (= Roman Venus), the wife the smith-god Hephaestus (= Roman Vulcan).

The scene from the Odyssey seems to take place on Mt Olympus, where the gods live communally. At the end of it, Hephaestus is persuaded to release the captured couple from the trap he had sprung for them, "and as soon as they were free they scampered off, Ares to Thrace and laughter-loving Aphrodite to Cyprus and to Paphos, where is her grove and her altar fragrant with burnt offerings" (p. 374 of Benjamin Cromwell's 2023 gloss of Samuel Butler's 1900 translation).

According to Eustathius of Thessalonica's commentary on this line of Homer's (Odyssey 8.361), the war-god is depicted heading to the aforementioned region because "Thrace is the dwelling-place of Ares on account of the warlike character of its peoples". Statius follows this line of thinking as it pertains to the god's Roman counterpart Mars.

Ovid, another Roman poet, takes this yet further by representing Mars as having been born in Thrace as well, on the shores of the Propontis (Fasti 5.257-258). Meanwhile Statius himself seems to imply that Mars was raised in the area too, in what would become the kingdom of Odrysia, where he tells us that the god once crawled as a baby in the snow (Thebaid 4.794).

See Book 7 of Statius' Thebaid (most relevant portion Lines 34-63) in:

Adinkra
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