We learn, again, that he was overcome and imprisoned by the youths Otus and Ephialtes, whom Apollo subdued: he was in bondage for thirteen months, and would have perished, had not Mercury released him[430].
He is able to assume the human figure, and, as we have seen, to bring darkness over contending hosts: but, when in Olympus, he remains ignorant[431] of the death of his son Ascalaphus, until he receives the information from Juno; as it was only from his Nymphs that the Sun learned the slaughter of his oxen. Nay, Minerva even puts on a particular helmet, in order that it may secure her from being recognised by Mars when within his view[432].
Mars in the Olympian court bears some resemblance to Ajax among the Grecian heroes. But the intellectual element, which appears to be simply blunt in Ajax, in Mars seems to be wholly wanting: so that he represents an animal principle in its crudest form: and is not so much an Ajax, as a Caliban.
We are not told that he is greedy of sacrifices, for no cultus is assigned to him: but he is represented as greedy of blood, and as capable of being satiated with it[433].
Except with Venus for his mere person, he has no favour with any other Olympian deities[434]. Juno describes him as lawless and as a fool: and Jupiter tells him that, were he the son of any other deity but himself, he would long ago have been ejected from his place in heaven[435].
On one occasion, his name is associated with those of Agamemnon and Neptune: but the due relation between them is still preserved. Agamemnon is compared with Jupiter as to his face and head; with Neptune as to his chest; and with Mars as to his waist. The eyes of Hector on the field of battle were like the Gorgon, and like Mars[436].
From the repeated allusions to contingencies in which he would have perished, there seems to be something more or less equivocal even about his title to immortality. If more, he is also much less, than man. He is perhaps the least human of the Olympian family; and is a compound between deity and brute.
The exhibitions of Mars, as wounded by Diomed for the Iliad, and in the lay of Demodocus for the Odyssey, seem to imply that this deity could not, in the time of Homer, have become an object of general or established religious worship in Greece.
Mars as yet scarcely Greek.
He is a local deity, and his abode is in Thrace. From thence he issues forth with his mythical son Terror to make war upon the Ephyri: a race whose name has a strong Greek savour, and whose hostile relation to Mars thus exhibited, tends, with other evidence, to place him in the category of foreign deities, not yet naturalized in the country, though made available by Homer for his Olympian Court. After the detection in the palace of Vulcan, it is to Thrace that he again repairs.