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Documentary, Ancient God of War
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00:00At the British Museum, archaeologists are working on a 13,000 year old war cemetery from Sudan.
00:10The earliest ever existing evidence of organised violence between humans.
00:16And the burials of some individuals are remarkable.
00:21These two fallen have been carefully buried with their heads pointing east as if this is some kind of sacred ritual.
00:29So what this suggests is that before society itself exists, we're choosing to turn war into something sacred.
00:43In this programme, I'm investigating the enduring relationship between warfare and worship.
00:53By following the trail of the ancient god of war, Mars.
00:59From phrases like martial law to the month of March and Mars the red planet, the figure of Mars has travelled down the centuries with mankind.
01:10For the Romans, he was a vital force in their drive to win and exploit an empire.
01:19I'll explore how they stole him from the Greeks and discover why the Greek god of war, Ares, was distrusted and reviled.
01:28You do not welcome his presence because his presence means death.
01:33I'll show how the notion of holy war has endured across the generations, from the medieval crusades in the Middle East to 17th century bloodshed in Europe.
01:44I'll pursue Mars as we were engulfed by two world wars.
01:51Everybody is familiar with the mustachioed figure of Kitchener pointing, saying your country needs you like the face of Mars himself.
01:58And I'll uncover the relationship between religion and conflict today.
02:09I'm going to explore why we choose to make war sacred.
02:13Are we channeling an essential desire for bloodshed?
02:17Are we justifying the fact that civilisation, where we have to live together, is always going to involve conflict?
02:24Is Mars immortal because war is always going to be an essential part of our lives?
02:32I've come to Tunisia to investigate how war worship was central to Rome's success.
03:00This is the site of a hugely significant Roman military victory.
03:12In 146 BC, Rome conquered its most formidable opponent, the Carthaginians, who ruled what the Romans called the Punic Empire.
03:23Their once beautiful capital, Carthage, now lay in ruins.
03:30The fall of Carthage marked the end of the punishing Punic Wars, which had stretched out for well over a century.
03:39The historian Appian estimated that 300,000 Romans had lost their lives.
03:44But it was a victory that was worth all of that pain, because this was a pivotal moment for the city.
03:53Rome was now set to become a superpower.
03:56The dominant force in the Mediterranean.
04:05These ruins are testament to the scale of the Roman destruction.
04:09Because this wasn't just about levelling a glittering city, but about killing to claim new lands.
04:15There are terrible distressing accounts of the massacre continuing for six days and six nights.
04:26Of women and children still breathing, being dragged into pits.
04:30And the whole neighbourhoods being burnt to the ground.
04:42Rome's extraordinary domination came thanks to centuries worth of military aggression.
04:48At its height, Rome would be the largest empire the world had ever seen.
04:53Spanning nearly two million square miles over three continents.
04:57Mars, the muscular, martial god of war, was the go-to patron for Rome's expansionist ambitions.
05:12So in a militaristic society, where a martial ethos was paramount and the gods were considered to be crucial to everyday life,
05:23it's no surprise, perhaps, that Mars wasn't just a premier god.
05:29He was thought to be the patron god of the city of Rome itself.
05:35Mars enjoyed this status because the Romans believed he was inextricably linked to Rome's foundation.
05:45Now, like all foundation myths, it's rather complicated.
05:48But actually, the most straightforward version comes to us courtesy of Virgil and his wonderful poem, The Aeneid.
05:55And the relevant passage is actually set here in Carthage.
05:59And basically, to paraphrase the story, Aeneas, the Trojan prince, is escaping from the war at Troy.
06:06And he ends up here in Carthage, where he falls passionately in love with the queen, Dido.
06:11The two of them have a raging affair. And the problem is, this is distracting from his real destiny, which is to go on and found Rome.
06:21Then, none other than the king of the gods himself, Jupiter, turns up and says,
06:26Don't worry, all be well, because Aeneas' descendants will go on to rule Italy.
06:32And one of them, stay with me, a virgin priestess called Rhea Silvia, is going to be raped by Mars, the god of war.
06:42And it is not a pretty story.
06:45The result of that rape will be two boys, Romulus and Remus.
06:49And one of them will found the city of Rome.
06:52But what is really crucial is that the city is not called Rome here.
06:58It's actually called the city of Mars.
07:06Mars was omnipresent across all of Rome's domains.
07:10Even in the night sky, he was there as the red planet Mars.
07:14And the figure of Mars dominated Rome's lunar calendar.
07:21Mars was considered such a vital god that his name was given to the most important month of the year, March.
07:29Now, this was actually the beginning of the Roman year, and it marked the start of the campaigning season.
07:33So when that happened, the soldier priests of Mars would make their way through the city, singing and dancing, celebrating the fact that wars could begin again.
07:44Mars was adored by the Romans, but they weren't the only ones to invest in war worship.
07:56The god had a much earlier incarnation in the society that the Romans admired above all others,
08:03the Greeks, whose civilisation had flourished before Rome rose to power.
08:07The Romans were religious magpies, and like most of their gods, Mars was basically an amalgam of lots of older gods,
08:20and in large part stolen from the Greeks.
08:23The Greek god of war was called Ares, and he has prehistoric roots.
08:28We know that he dates right the way back to the Bronze Age from this rather brilliant bit of evidence.
08:38What you're looking at is the image of a Linear B writing tablet, and Linear B was an early form of Greek.
08:45And this particular one was found in Knossos on the island of Crete.
08:48And the symbols here read RA. This was found in a military arsenal, and this is our very first evidence of Ares being actually worshipped as a god.
09:02But there's something really interesting here, because RA actually means a curse or an imprecation.
09:08So we know that for the early Greeks, the god of war was not a good thing.
09:13Like the Romans, the Greeks could be militaristic, and like Mars, Ares was an ultimate embodiment of the powerful warrior.
09:24But significantly, the early Greeks had a very different relationship with their god of war.
09:32So for instance, these are a few lines from the Iliad, which was the epic poem written by Homer describing the Trojan War.
09:38To me, you are the most hateful of all the gods. Constant conflict is dear to your heart. Wars and battles.
09:49And those are words said by Zeus, who was actually Ares' father.
09:54Elsewhere in the Iliad, Zeus describes Ares as his most despised son.
10:00For us today, this is just a myth, a good yarn.
10:18But for the ancient Greeks, this was a tale that dealt with real events, real people and gods who walked with them every step of the way.
10:26These marble sculptures once adorned the East Pediment, the focal point of the Parthenon, the most spectacular temple in 5th century classical Athens.
10:46Gods and goddesses abound.
10:48Like the Romans, the Greeks had a pantheon of the key gods and goddesses, the mighty Olympians.
10:56And as the son of the king of the gods, the Almighty Zeus, Ares was of prime Olympian stock.
11:04Now, the major deities are here on this pediment. But is Ares here? No, he's not.
11:10To find him, you'd have to look amongst the smaller figures below and inside. And even then, he's rather lost in the crowd.
11:22And just look at him here. Obviously, he's lost his face across time. But even so, he's right at the end of the line. He's almost cowering in a corner.
11:35Now, this whole scheme celebrates Athenian supremacy and military dominance. So, in theory, it's absolutely dream territory for the god of war.
11:47Calamitous, wild Ares simply wasn't widely worshipped in ancient Greece.
11:52In fact, those the Greeks said were mad enough to really idolise him were foreigners. And worse than that, women, the legendary warlike Amazons.
12:05The Greeks believed that the Amazons had an intimate connection to the god of war.
12:10They believed that the Amazons lived right the way around the Black Sea and one of the islands that they inhabited was called Ares Island.
12:16They said that the Amazons were in fact nothing less than the daughters of Ares and that they sacrificed to their father before they went into battle.
12:29The Amazons' fabled prowess in battle and the belief that they worshipped war didn't make them heroic in the eyes of the Greeks.
12:37In fact, quite the opposite.
12:39Calling the Amazons the daughters of Ares wasn't a compliment. It was a curse.
12:48To find out why the Greeks were so very hostile towards their god of war, I'm meeting Dr Lucy Jackson.
12:55They don't worship Ares in the way that you might imagine a society that frequently goes to war should do.
13:03Why is that, do you think?
13:06I think it's because they're actually all so close to war in their daily lives.
13:11I think it's because they know what it actually means to go to war, that they do feel very ambivalent towards it.
13:18In the kind of smaller society in ancient Greece, you would know someone who would be going to war and you would know people who had died in battle.
13:26So it's not something that you very easily glorify.
13:30Again, one of the epithets that's often given to the god of war, Ares, is a bane for mankind.
13:37And that's something that everyone can share in that you do not welcome his presence because his presence means death.
13:43A lot of the gods and goddesses are pretty bellicose in the ancient world.
13:47So what makes Ares different?
13:48I think the epithets that he's given are often quite telling.
13:53Zeus himself says, Ares, you are the most hated to me.
13:57And he gets a lot of insults thrown at him as well.
14:01So he's not presented in a very good light.
14:03And there's something about Ares in particular.
14:06I think it's this wildness, the focus that he has on fear and terror that make him not just ambivalent or worthy of suspicion, but actually outright hated, not just by the gods, but by mortals themselves.
14:24Do you think that the Greeks really believe that there is a divine force that encourages men to fight?
14:30I think so, in the same way that they were happily living alongside divine forces and mortal forces all the time.
14:38I think they saw them as very much interacting together.
14:42So I think they very much recognised that although Ares and his fury and fire is a necessary part of being able to succeed in war, he's also very dangerous and in need of controlling.
14:55The Greeks may have been deeply wary of Ares, but he did help reconcile the tension between war's horror and its value.
15:06The fact that some victories enabled some to flourish, to act as a spur for civilisation.
15:12As the philosopher Plato said, a society without war is no more than a society fit for pigs.
15:21Back at the British Museum, I'm investigating evidence of how ritualising warfare helped strengthen even the earliest prehistoric communities.
15:30These boxes contain dozens of skeletons from around 13,000 years ago, buried together in the Sudan in what some have called a war cemetery.
15:42Many of the bones bear the scars of battle wounds, the earliest evidence of organised violence between humans on the planet.
15:51So who is this poor person? How much do we know about his or her story?
15:58It's actually a female individual. We've been able to analyse her bones confirming that she was in her 30s or 40s when she died.
16:05And do we know how she died?
16:07There's evidence that she suffered multiple wounds over a period of time.
16:11We have a defensive fracture here, which typically occurs when you raise your arm to defend yourself against a blow, and that's exactly what's happened in this case.
16:22What's extraordinary is that you have two bones in your forearm, and the break has gone through both bones, suggesting a lot of force.
16:30But again here, the bones have healed, so this again happened before she died, giving it time to heal.
16:36Okay, so that's not what's killed her then?
16:39No, no, this is really well fused, so it's showing that it occurred a long time, or at least several weeks or months before she died.
16:46So do we know what kind of the mortal blow is?
16:49It's hard to tell what killed her, because of course we can only see the evidence from the bones, but what we do have is the back part of her hip bone.
16:56And you can see that an impact of an arrowhead, the shuttered part of the bone, and part of the flint, part of the flint that makes up the arrowhead has been left behind, and you can see that clearly.
17:11We also have two cut marks on this long bone here, you can see one quite clearly here, and another one here.
17:18Yes.
17:19So this is also likely to have been another arrowhead.
17:23So again, repeated episodes of violence, which eventually is likely to have been the cause of her death.
17:31And do we know why they're being attacked?
17:33It has been suggested that it was competition for resources.
17:38Imagine 13,000 years ago the Nile was more erratic than it is today, and I think the land that people could exploit for food and resources would have been under severe pressure.
17:50The fact that she's been buried so carefully, I mean that must say something to us.
17:54Yeah, what's extraordinary about the cemetery is that everybody has been carefully buried in the same manner.
18:01For everybody to be clearly facing the south with their heads to the east, suggest that they were deliberately placed.
18:08Some people have argued that maybe it was a special cemetery, a place where people who died of violence, maybe warriors, where they were being buried.
18:20The burial rites at Jebel Sahaba not only show the horrors of war, but how this community responded.
18:28Fighting side by side in conflict, and then respecting their dead through ritual, our early ancestors created a sense of shared identity.
18:38Warfare had generated an idea of them and us.
18:49So, Mars's roots and the sacralisation of warfare run deep.
19:05And here in Tunisia, there's further evidence of how worshipping a god of war can help to foster a feeling of togetherness and, in Rome's case, to justify her imperial ambitions.
19:17This is what the Roman historian Livy wrote.
19:22If any nation should claim sacred origin and point back to divine paternity, that nation is Rome.
19:30She claims Mars as her founding father, and such is her renown in war, the nations of the world just accept this as they accept her dominion.
19:41Now, Livy was a teenager when Julius Caesar was assassinated, so he was an eyewitness to Rome's journey from Republic to Empire.
19:52And what's really fascinating is that on that journey, Mars gets a significant promotion.
19:57He now becomes an active part of the imperial machine.
20:06Evidence of why worshipping Mars was so important to Rome's empire builders can be found in the ruins of the ancient city of Mactaris.
20:15A hundred miles south of Carthage, Mactaris was originally a refugee settlement of Carthaginians who fled the destruction of the Punic Wars.
20:27Two centuries on, now part of the Roman Empire, Mactaris had become a prosperous Roman town.
20:34The incredible triumphal arch that still dominates the ruins is evidence of this transformation.
20:48While their ancestors may have been the victims of Roman conquest, the town's citizens now celebrated Roman military might.
20:58And Mars was crucial to their sense of imperial belonging.
21:13This beautiful building right in the very heart of the city was originally a kind of clubhouse for a group of young men who were fervent Mars worshippers.
21:24Now we know this for two reasons. First of all, a statue of Mars was discovered just here, where he was adored by them in his cult.
21:33But there was also another really intriguing bit of evidence.
21:37Above the doorway, there was an inscribed lintel.
21:40And in the inscription, we read that the young men are linked directly to Mars,
21:46and that crucially, Mars was linked directly to the Roman emperor himself.
21:52To find out why the city's youth worshipped Mars so fervently, I'm meeting Mactaris's archaeological director, Mohadeen Chaouli,
22:02to show me the lintel dedicated to Rome's first emperor, Augustus.
22:07And this is the inscription, is it?
22:09This is the famous inscription.
22:11Wow.
22:13Yeah, it's nice.
22:14Really great.
22:15Yes.
22:16As you see, we have a lot of names, 69 names, and a lot of them are Punic names.
22:25Yeah.
22:26Either they had Punic names, if not, they have Latin names, but the name of the father is Punic.
22:33Yeah.
22:34They are the members of this association, the Juventus of the city of Mactar,
22:42and they are loving the god Mars Augustus.
22:46And we know that it's dedicated to Mars, because I can see, so, Martis, that's right, Augustus, isn't it?
22:54So, Mars as Augustus.
22:55Yeah.
22:57This association paid for the construction of a basilica and aurea.
23:04A grain store.
23:05It's like a sort of grain store.
23:07Yeah.
23:08We say that it's an association, but it's like a militia.
23:13It is necessary to maintain order, to maintain security.
23:19So you've got Punic guys signing up to this Roman project.
23:23Yeah.
23:24It's important, this mixture, Punic and Latin.
23:29People here needs Mars, not only for wars, but for the prosperity of agriculture.
23:39It's not only a god of wars, it is a god of fertility also.
23:45So Mars helps you to gain an empire and to maintain an empire?
23:49And to maintain an empire, it's true.
23:51It's the beginning of Romanisation, and it's important to get some local people loving this Latin god.
24:02It's really important.
24:04The Mars cult here is telling.
24:08Warfare, however horrific, can bring stability.
24:13Crops can grow again.
24:15Life can flourish.
24:17Mars could be sold not just as a warmonger, but as a peacemaker.
24:21No one understood this better than the Emperor Augustus.
24:26Augustus had this coin minted after he'd founded a new temple.
24:32The Temple of Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger, right in the very heart of the Roman Forum.
24:37Basically, this was a kind of sanctuary of war and of imperial military might.
24:44It's where commanders would assemble before they left on campaign.
24:47And it's where victorious generals returned after they triumphed abroad.
24:54As Mars Ultor, the Avenger, the god combined the empire's aggression with its desire for order in its conquered territories.
25:02Rome wanted to exploit new fertile lands, not scorched earth.
25:08So as a god of fertility and agriculture, Mars was key to prosperity.
25:13To the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome.
25:17I'm heading to the Roman city of Thistris, now called El Jem, in eastern Tunisia.
25:26Thistris grew rich from the production of olive oil, enjoying the fruits of Roman peace and stability.
25:34Its citizens were able to build gorgeous monuments that rivaled the very best in the city of Rome itself.
25:39Its spectacular amphitheatre seated 35,000 spectators, second only to Rome's Great Colosseum.
25:50It was in arenas like this across the empire that Mars' roles as patron of bloodshed and as peacekeeper were combined.
26:01After Augustus had founded his Temple of Mars altar, he inaugurated the Ludi Martialis,
26:07the annual games of Mars.
26:11And from all accounts, these were horrifically spectacular events.
26:16We're told that hundreds of lions and crocodiles were slaughtered,
26:20that the Battle of Salamis was re-enacted,
26:23and of course there were gladiatorial contests,
26:26with the cometants praying to Mars before they fought.
26:30Basically, these were glorious festivals of death.
26:37Gladiators were even seen as soldiers of Mars,
26:42and some amphitheatres had sanctuaries to worship the god.
26:47One particularly successful gladiator was celebrated as being the embodiment of the martial spirit.
26:54Hermes, the martial delight of our age.
26:58Hermes, the glory of Mars Universal.
27:01The origins of gladiatorial games were religious, a dramatic form of sacrifice,
27:12literally making something sacred by killing it.
27:15These blood sports satisfied both a deep human desire for ritualised death, and were a living demonstration of Rome's imperial might.
27:27But a new form of sacrificial victim, who believed in a new god, was soon to be found in the sands at Elgem, and across North Africa, and indeed the rest of the empire.
27:42Martyred Christians.
27:46Whereas Mars justified death in the pursuit of power, this new Christ cult argued that it wasn't the mighty, but the meek, who would inherit the earth.
27:57We're told that on the 12th of March 295 AD, a young man called Maximilianus was brought here so that he could become part of the army.
28:14The proconsul agreed to take him on, but Maximilianus very politely refused, saying that he couldn't fight because he was a Christian.
28:20The proconsul flew into a rage and threatened all kinds of punishments and a horrific death.
28:27To their surprise, Maximilianus simply said, bring it on. I cannot fight for the world, only for the Lord.
28:36Aged 21 years, 3 months and 18 days, Maximilianus was then beheaded.
28:45He's possibly the first recorded instance of a conscientious objector.
28:50But war was far too central to the success of Rome for the protest of one minority cult to dent Mars' armour.
29:01And just a generation later, when Constantine, a Roman emperor himself, took up the Christian faith, war worship endured.
29:09The fact that Constantine became a Christian had surprisingly little impact on the status of Mars.
29:15And if you think about it, when Constantine converted, we're told that he saw a blazing cross in the sky and the words in hoc signos vinces under this sign you shall conquer, which is hardly very pacifist.
29:30And then the theme continues. And if you look at this coin that he had minted after he'd converted, it shows on it the God of Mars in a temple.
29:39And even 20 years later, once his son is in power, there's another coin minted here.
29:45And this shows a Christian warrior and we know it's Christian because it has the Cairo symbol, the symbol of Christ and his standard.
29:54But this looks pretty much exactly like Mars, the God of War.
29:59Rome had successfully co-opted Christianity into the imperial mission.
30:07But there was a theological tension.
30:11In the fourth century, what's now Tunisia became an important centre in the newly Christianised Roman Empire.
30:19And it still has a small community of Christian worshippers here today.
30:23Father Silvio Moreno explained to me how Christian teaching challenged martial precepts.
30:32In the New Testament, there's no time where Jesus himself will say, use the violence.
30:44On the contrary, he says, love your enemies.
30:48You must love your enemies, those who make you evil, those who hate you.
30:52The war god should have been dead and buried.
31:04But even a Christianised Roman Empire needed to fight to keep Christ's earthly territory in place.
31:11Now, conveniently, ancient authors, Aristotle, Cicero and the like, had eloquently laid out philosophical justifications for divinely sanctioned war.
31:31St. Augustine, who studied these classical works, offered a solution.
31:39He stated that wars could be just, that it was right to fight, as long as the battle was sanctioned by the one true God.
31:52Because most people think of Christianity as, on paper, being a peaceful religion.
31:57So, there are ideas of love thy neighbour and turn your other cheek.
32:02Is there anything, do you think, in the New Testament, that actually justifies the use of violence?
32:06There is a principle that always maintains St. Augustine, which is very important.
32:11I think that for us, today, and that's why we follow the idea.
32:16He says that we cannot do a war to do a war, but to obtain peace.
32:21Of course, the people have the right to defend itself.
32:24It's very natural. It's a legitimate defense.
32:27Backed up by St. Augustine's just war theory, Christians now had license to kill without compromising their faith.
32:37While the warlike Mars was also a god of peacetime, ironically, the peaceful Christian deity had become a god of war.
32:45In the 11th century, the Christian church would put this theory into practice.
32:51Embarking on the Crusades, centuries of holy war to reclaim the holy lands from Muslim possession.
32:58And Mars, the god of war, not only survived in spirit, but in name.
33:03There's no doubt that Mars was in the minds of these men.
33:08When William Marshall, who was probably the most famous of all Crusading knights,
33:13he was a celebrity in his own day, and he fought against Saladin.
33:17When he died, he had these words inscribed around his tomb.
33:21Miles eram martis.
33:25I was a soldier of Mars.
33:34The Crusades saw waves of Christian soldiers head to the holy lands.
33:42Fighting the cause of holy war.
33:48And that influence can be tracked down here in Jordan.
34:03The Crusades were on his own day and in his own way of the Roman Empire.
34:14The Crusades were on his own stage.
34:16The Crusades fell and he died.
34:18At the same time he died of his own system.
34:22Dating to 1115, this splendid fortress, Xobac, was the first castle built by these Crusading knights.
34:30knights, a stronghold from which Christian soldiers could launch their just and righteous
34:37military mission.
34:40But by all accounts, one of the Christian rulers of Showback had forgotten all codes
34:48of chivalry.
34:50Raynaud of Chatillon had a reputation for being a bullying robber knight.
34:56By all accounts, he sounds like a dangerously clever psychopath.
35:00He used to kill his enemies by putting their heads in wooden boxes and then throwing them
35:06off the battlements so that they stayed fully conscious right through the moments that their
35:11bodies were being destroyed.
35:15In theory, just war precluded the evils of war, love of violence.
35:21But this was as brutal as any conflict fought on the fields of Mars.
35:27From this castle, Raynaud attacked a group of Muslim travellers who were making their way
35:31across this landscape to the holy city of Medina.
35:35He stole their treasure and enslaved or slaughtered the pilgrims.
35:40Today, considering Raynaud's actions, it's hard to reconcile the savagery that took place
35:46at Showback and elsewhere with the notion of a just or holy war.
35:51Until you understand the medieval mindset.
35:56In what was called the Book of Knighthood, one medieval author, Christine de Pizan, set
36:01out the guidelines for being a good Christian knight.
36:04And Mars gets a really surprisingly prominent shout out.
36:09Mars, the god of battle, may well be called the son of God.
36:15And every knight that loveth and showeth arms and deeds of knighthood may be called a son
36:21of Mars.
36:25For crusading Christian knights, sacralising war had justified their actions.
36:30But they weren't alone in thinking that God was on their side.
36:37After experiencing the initial savagery of the Christians, the medieval Muslim fighters
36:42increasingly believed that they too were engaged in a righteous struggle, a jihad.
36:49One Muslim who fought in the crusades and who fell in battle was buried with these words
36:53inscribed on his tomb.
36:56He was described as a sword of those who fight the holy war.
37:02Leader of the armies of the Muslims, vanquisher of the infidels and the polytheists.
37:09On other tombs, men are described as martyrs.
37:12They've gained immortality and enduring pleasure in the afterlife.
37:19Ironically, Christian writers refer to Muslims as mere worshippers of Mars.
37:25Other sides claimed the other were pagans and that they were doing God's will.
37:31It wouldn't be until the 15th century that the legitimisation of war under a sacred banner
37:37was really challenged.
37:39The Dutch philosopher Erasmus was particularly vocal.
37:43Erasmus didn't believe that any war could be justified simply because you kidded yourself
37:48that you'd got God on your side.
37:51As he rather neatly puts it, who does not think his own cause just?
37:56Who can lack a pretext for going to war?
38:00And to buttress his anti-war rhetoric, he refers directly back to the Greeks and to Homer who
38:06draws inspiration from.
38:09Homer coins a new word to describe the God of War, allo pros allos, on one side and then the other.
38:16And he applies it to Mars because he is two-faced.
38:19He favours one side and then the other.
38:22There is no allegiance with Mars.
38:24He simply cannot be relied on.
38:26As Erasmus says, a like to all is the God of War and slays the slayer in turn.
38:36Erasmus was writing during the Renaissance, when artists and philosophers used classical
38:42figures to question a century's worth of received wisdom.
38:47Through the figure of Mars, they asked whether warfare was indeed an essential part of the
38:52human condition.
38:55From Botticelli's famous painting, Mars and Venus, where the bellicose Mars is lulled
39:01by his paramour, to Veronese's Mars and Venus united by love, they asked whether there was
39:10any point to any war, holy or otherwise.
39:20I am visiting the National Gallery in London to explore how these ideas played out in politics.
39:29In 1618, Europe became embroiled in a devastating sectarian war between rival Catholic and Protestant
39:37states that would last 30 years and see 8 million lose their lives.
39:45Paris were made to broker peace, and in 1629, the artist Rubens was sent to England, not just
39:51as a painter, but as a diplomatic peace envoy.
40:02It's an amazing painting, this, and it feels like there's all kind of messages going on.
40:07Yes, this is definitely a very, very busy painting.
40:10So, in a way, I think the heart of the composition is this figure of peace who we see here feeding
40:16her son with milk, but really the whole picture, in a way, is about the benefits of peace and
40:21the richness that comes with that. So, there's this lovely satyr leaning in the foreground,
40:26offering the children this rich cornucopia, literally kind of overflowing with all the
40:30different kinds of fruit. There's the most amazing, playful leopard, and the satyr and
40:35the leopard, they're really wild creatures. You know, normally, they'd be dangerous, they'd
40:39be a threat, but here, because peace is so governing everything, they've become playful and subdued.
40:45So, it's just a kind of real elegy, in a way, to all the benefits of peace and how widespread
40:51those are.
40:52And this is Mars here, who's being banished, who's being pushed out of the painting.
40:56Yes, absolutely. So, the figure who we see behind peace is Minerva, goddess of wisdom,
41:01and she is pushing Mars away. So, his kind of black suit of armour there, he's being banished
41:07along with these kind of ethereal, strange furies that go with him, probably symbolising
41:12kind of pestilence and famine and all the horrors that come along with warfare. And actually,
41:17what we see in the foreground are all the benefits of peace when Mars isn't allowed
41:21to interfere.
41:22I mean, because it's usual for people to use classical figures in an allegorical way like
41:27this, but what is particularly personal about this? Because it kind of feels like a very,
41:31it feels like a very passionate picture.
41:33It is. I think this is a very passionate and very, very personal picture. So, this is a picture
41:38that Rubens paints when he's in London. He's actually here kind of with two hats on. On
41:43the one hand, he is here as a diplomat, so he's been sent by the Spanish court to kind
41:48of open peace negotiations. On the other, he's here working as an artist. And this painting
41:54comes from the meeting of those joint missions, from the diplomatic and the artistic, and he
41:59creates this painting as a gift to the king, really kind of summing up in paint what it
42:04is that he's arguing for in person.
42:07And he's witnessed some real horrors during this war?
42:10He has. I mean, he's someone who's really kind of lived with the traumas of what war
42:15brings, especially in his home city of Antwerp, which really, really suffered during this
42:19period.
42:20I mean, do you think, you know, it's easy to say that you want peace. Do you think that
42:25he thinks it is a possibility?
42:27I think absolutely. And I think more even than just a possibility, I think he is making the
42:31argument here that it's absolutely a prerogative, because although this is a painting very much
42:35about all the classical figures and the kind of classical allegories that are taking place,
42:39there's also really at the heart of the composition, this group of lovely children who are so tenderly
42:45painted, so beautiful with their wide eyes. And it's the children, of course, who are going to be
42:49damaged by war. We know that these children are based on the children of the person Rubens was
42:54staying with in London. So I think there is this kind of heartfelt plea to kind of to take the path of
42:59wisdom rather than of warfare. Genuinely felt as a work of art.
43:03Absolutely. Yep.
43:09When Rubens painted Mars again in his horrors of war ten years later, the buoyant optimism had faded.
43:16Europe was still steeped in blood. In this painting, Mars charges forth, trampling books representing
43:26wisdom. Venus tries to hold him back in vain and his accompanying furies take centre stage, ravaging
43:34the cowering victims at their feet. Using the ancient god as a symbol of the chaos and destruction of war
43:44had kept Mars alive, but hadn't acted as a deterrent. In fact, as Europe continued to look back to ancient Rome and Greece for inspiration,
43:54the figure of Mars was used once again to promote the idea that war mongering was a route to peace and prosperity.
44:06Now, this is one of the most ambitious and bellicose empire builders of the 19th century. It's Napoleon Bonaparte.
44:14But here, slightly larger than he was in real life and heroically naked, this is Napoleon depicting himself as Mars.
44:23But what's really interesting is that this isn't Mars the chaotic, bloodthirsty god of war. This is Mars the peacemaker.
44:32And we mustn't forget that Mars had children called Panic and Fear, but he also had a daughter named Harmony.
44:41And what this statue is doing is playing on the idea that conflict is something that allows societies not just to survive, but to thrive.
44:51Napoleon celebrated Mars as a bringer of order, just as the Romans had done 2,000 years before.
45:01He might have styled himself a latter-day Roman conqueror, with territories stretching across the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
45:08But the gifts of this war were not peace, but churn and change.
45:14As one ancient philosopher put it,
45:17War is a catalyst, the father and king of all. Some war has made gods, some slaves.
45:27Conflicts between European nations were now escalating to engulf the globe in the most devastating war the world had ever seen.
45:37I'm meeting Dr Toby Thacker amongst London's memorials to modern conflict to find out how Mars and the classical world influenced those who fought in World War I.
45:50So just that one inscription above us, 49,076 of the Royal Regiments of Artillery gave their lives for king and country in the Great War. That's from one regiment.
46:02The numbers tell their own dreadful story.
46:06I think when we're talking about the First World War, it's so important to remember that in the minds of these men, this was in some ways a religious war.
46:14I mean, they do feel that they are in some way doing God's will.
46:18Very much so. The war was seen, I think, by the great majority of people in Britain in August 1914 as a moral crusade.
46:27But for many of these men, the pagan world is still present in this conflict. I mean, Mars is referenced a lot in iconography, in the literature of the time.
46:35Asquith, the Prime Minister himself, was a great classical scholar. Others we think of, generally, Ian Hamilton, who was in charge of the Gallipoli campaign.
46:45These were men for whom Mars was almost a living presence. Everybody, even to this day, is familiar with the mustachioed figure of Kitchener pointing, saying,
46:55Your country needs you, and Alan Moorhead describes how this poster was everywhere in Britain. It says, Kitchener, like the face of Mars himself.
47:05This is the cat badge from the Artists' Rifles.
47:09Mars and Minerva?
47:10Yes. And the Artists' Rifles was used as an officer training corps.
47:15And as the war developed, literally thousands of young men were trained in the Artists' Rifles and went on to serve in other roles right through the British Armed Forces.
47:27These were young men who had been to public school, were steeped in the classical tradition.
47:33Their whole frame of reference for understanding public affairs, politics, government, and, of course, the business of warfare, was classical.
47:43So these are fighters who have believed in the heroic ideal of the soldier, and that's something which is very classical.
47:50You see that slipping away as the war continues.
47:54Yes. There is an increasingly growing sense of cynicism and disillusion.
48:00This, of course, we're, I think, most familiar with through the work of some of the war poets.
48:05Wilfred Owen's very bitter poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, where he took to task that generation of older people, of teachers, of priests, of recruiting officers,
48:17who were trying to, using classical ideals, trying to suggest that, you know, it was such a sweet and a good thing to die for your country.
48:30By 1918, after four grueling years, it's estimated that 37 million people had died across the globe.
48:43As monuments to the dead were built in civic centres up and down the country, Mars was no longer upheld as a bringer of peace.
48:52This arch was built to commemorate the 585 men from the London and South Western Railway who sacrificed their lives in the Great War.
49:06Now, up at the top, you've got a triumphant figure of Britannia.
49:10But what's really interesting are the two sculptures underneath.
49:13And on the left, there's the female figure of the goddess Bellona.
49:18And Bellona was none other than the wife of the great war god Mars.
49:23Bellona was not a creature to be messed with.
49:27And even in the ancient world, people feared her.
49:30Her adherents had to slash their arms and their legs in her honour.
49:34And she's surrounded by these ghoulish figures.
49:37But what happens then is very interesting.
49:40When you move to 1918, suddenly the representation is of Athena.
49:44Athena, the goddess of wisdom and peace and righteous judgement and victory.
49:50And the idea is that people have learnt from the horrors of the Great War that war is not necessarily a good thing.
49:58Mars perhaps has to be left behind and instead women and men had to pursue the cause of peace and wisdom.
50:11But just two decades later, those hopes would be dashed.
50:15Between 1939 and 1945, it's thought that up to 85 million were the casualties of war.
50:32Over 200,000 dying when the atomic bombs fell.
50:37If World War I hadn't been able to kill off Mars, surely the scale and the horrors of World War II would.
50:48Anti-war polemics were increasingly produced.
50:54This was published in 1945, just three months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
51:00And it's entitled The Eternal Art, being a speech made by Mars in his own defence as God of War.
51:08I consider this to be a propitious moment to talk to you frankly.
51:13Because it seems to me the time has come at last to dispense with my services forever.
51:18Your feverish scientific progress is making my work increasingly strenuous in my old age.
51:23I want to retire.
51:25There isn't even any vestige of sport left in what I do.
51:30You yourselves, through the atom bomb, have provided me with the means to destroy the world without a fight.
51:38For your own sakes, I sincerely hope that this is my swan song.
51:43The threat of nuclear Armageddon gripped the world's imagination with fear and dread.
51:54Mars would get a new outing, no longer an object of worship, but of terror.
52:01These are just two posters from a whole plethora of films that came out in the 50s and 60s.
52:07And they're absolutely packed out movie theatres.
52:10Now, on the face of it, the theme is just a common one.
52:14It's all about the red planet and the threat from Mars.
52:18But what's really interesting, that this isn't just sci-fi blockbuster fantasy.
52:23There's a really serious political undertow.
52:26For the threat from the red planet, read the Red Scare.
52:30And for the Martians, belligerent, unpredictable, militaristic, read the Communists.
52:36Now, this is something that has been going on since antiquity.
52:40We have to create an outsider, another.
52:43We have to turn us into us and them.
52:46From Hiroshima onwards, when weapons of mass destruction offer godlike powers, is there still room for a god in war?
53:03I've come to Sandhurst in Surrey, the British Army's chief officer training college, to ask what role the sacred has in 21st century conflict.
53:17Regimented training bears some of the hallmarks of ritual and spectacle that the ancients would have appreciated.
53:28And these young women and men still parade under the gaze of Mars.
53:32That's Mars and Minerva up there, and young officers who pass out here talk about passing out under the watchful eye of the god of war and the goddess of wisdom.
53:47I'm meeting army chaplain Andrew Totten to ask him about his direct experience of war and religion in the British military.
54:01You walk in here under those brilliant figures of Mars, the god of war and Minerva, the goddess of wisdom on the pediment.
54:07Do you think they actually mean something to the officers who train and have trained here?
54:14I think there is that desire to look back to your classical roots, to look back to Rome, to look back to Athens.
54:22The really interesting thing is when you get Jerusalem coming into it as well.
54:27So those classical gods, what does it mean when you bring into the figure of Mars, for example, the figure of Christ?
54:33Not an avenging God, but a suffering God.
54:37There are classical references everywhere.
54:40I mean, there's a huge banner there, adultery, decorum es, pro, patria, mori, sweeten, right it is to die for your fatherland.
54:47The men and then the women who've trained here, again, do you think that these references are something that they've carried with them,
54:53that they've taken with them onto the battlefield or into active service?
54:56I think probably modern officer cadets are probably more shocked to see that quotation from Horace via Wilfred Owen's interpretation, obviously, of the pity of war.
55:08And of course, war is a pitiable thing.
55:11Do you think there can be ever such a thing as a sacred war?
55:14No. No, war can't be sacred.
55:19But the foundational principles of the British law of armed conflict include those of humanity, of reducing suffering.
55:29So it's life, not war, that is sacred.
55:32As a historian, I see through recorded time men who have been happy to call themselves soldiers of Mars.
55:40Is this a tradition that you can imagine continuing into the future?
55:46If you see that as the warrior tradition, yes, that is alive.
55:52You'll find warriors in every regiment, certainly every combat regiment of the British Army.
55:58Some people say that there's a similar intensity to being in active service, to fighting on the battlefield and a religious experience.
56:09I think certainly of a particular patrol in Afghanistan where the soldiers came under ambush.
56:16And in the course of that, had to respond and begin to fight back against the enemy.
56:25I have never seen soldiers happier, more professionally fulfilled, where there was the sense of their discipline, their training, their skills, all coming together.
56:37At the same time as trying to protect any innocent people who may have been in that particular battle space.
56:44So there is almost that kind of rapture that can happen in combat.
56:48And what about you? Because you're obviously a man of faith, you're also a man of war.
56:53How do you reconcile those two impulses in your life?
56:58I don't think you ever completely, emotionally reconcile them.
57:03I don't think you should. I think you need to keep the sensitivity to all those ambiguities within it.
57:09Horrible things happen in war. The most ghastly things happen in that respect.
57:15And that's where it leaves that sense of lasting ambiguity.
57:19You know that you're doing something that needs to be done, but it may still, in its own essence, be something that is evil.
57:26As I've been exploring the many incarnations of Mars throughout history, what's become clear is that the God of War isn't simply a one-dimensional harbinger of chaos and destruction.
57:40His raging spirit can bring rapture.
57:46And his military might deliver the benefits of peace, prosperity and order.
57:54Surely that is partly why we've sacralised war.
57:58Why, as the Greeks put it, men love the lamentable works of Ares.
58:03Because the uncomfortable truth is that battle can benefit societies.
58:07But today, with annihilation possible at the push of a button, and with the passions of holy war still running high,
58:16we have to embrace the idea that immortal Mars will have no domain to rule over,
58:23unless we accept that it is not war that is sacred, but life.
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