Original subtitles

At the British Museum, archaeologists are working

on a 13,000-year-old war cemetery from Sudan,

the earliest-ever existing evidence of organised violence

between humans.

And the burials of some individuals are remarkable.

These two fallen have been carefully buried, with their heads

pointing east, as if this is some kind of sacred ritual.

So, what this suggests is that, before society itself exists,

we're choosing to turn war into something sacred.

In this programme, I'm investigating the enduring relationship

between warfare and worship...

..by following the trail of the ancient god of war, Mars.

From 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.

For the Romans, he was a vital force in their drive to win

and exploit an empire.

I'll explore how they stole him from the Greeks,

and discover why the Greek god of war,

Ares, was distrusted and reviled.

You do not welcome his presence because his presence means death.

I'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.

I'll pursue Mars as we were engulfed by two world wars.

Everybody is familiar with the moustachioed figure

of Kitchener pointing, saying, "Your country needs you"

like the face of Mars himself.

And I'll uncover the relationship between religion and conflict today.

I'm going to explore why we choose to make war sacred.

Are we channelling an essential desire for bloodshed?

Are we justifying the fact that civilisation,

where we have to live together, is always going to involve conflict?

Is Mars immortal because war is always going to be

an essential part of our lives?

I've come to Tunisia to investigate how war worship was central

to Rome's success.

This is the site of a hugely significant Roman military victory.

In 146 BC, Rome conquered its most formidable opponent,

the Carthaginians, who ruled what the Romans called

the Punic Empire.

Their once-beautiful capital, Carthage, now lay in ruins.

The fall of Carthage marked the end of the punishing Punic Wars,

which had stretched out for well over a century.

The historian, Appian, estimated that 300,000 Romans

had lost their lives.

But it was a victory that was worth all of that pain,

because this was a pivotal moment for the city.

Rome was now set to become a superpower, the dominant force

in the Mediterranean.

These ruins are testament to the scale of the Roman destruction.

Because this wasn't just about levelling a glittering city,

but about killing to claim new lands.

There are terrible, distressing accounts of the massacre

continuing for six days and six nights,

of women and children still breathing

being dragged into pits, and of whole neighbourhoods

being burnt to the ground.

Rome's extraordinary domination came thanks to centuries' worth

of military aggression.

At its height, Rome would be the largest empire

the world had ever seen, spanning nearly 2 million square miles,

over three continents.

Mars, the muscular martial god of war, was the go-to patron

for Rome's expansionist ambitions.

So, in a militaristic society, where a martial ethos was paramount

and the gods were considered to be crucial to everyday life,

it's no surprise perhaps that Mars wasn't just a premier god -

he was thought to be the patron god of the city of Rome itself.

Mars enjoyed this status because the Romans believed

he was inextricably linked to Rome's foundation.

Now, like all foundation myths, it's rather complicated.

But, actually, the most straightforward version comes to us

courtesy of Virgil and his wonderful poem

The Aeneid, and the relevant passage is actually set here in Carthage.

Basically, to paraphrase the story, Aeneas, the Trojan prince,

is escaping from the war at Troy and he ends up here in Carthage,

where he falls passionately in love with the Queen, Dido.

The 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.

Then, none other than the king of the gods himself,

Jupiter, turns up and says, "Don't worry, all will be well."

Because Aeneas's descendants will go on to rule Italy,

and one of them -

stay with me -

a virgin priestess called Rhea Silvia is going to be raped

by Mars, the god of war.

It's not a pretty story.

The result of that rape will be two boys, Romulus and Remus,

and one of them will found the city of Rome.

But what is really crucial is that the city is not called Rome here,

it's actually called the city of Mars.

Mars was omnipresent across all of Rome's domains.

Even in the night sky, he was there as the Red Planet, Mars.

And the figure of Mars dominated Rome's lunar calendar.

Mars was considered such a vital god that his name was given

to the most important month of the year, March.

This was actually the beginning of the Roman year,

and it marked the start of the campaigning season.

So, when that happens, the soldier priests of Mars

would make their way through the city, singing and dancing,

celebrating the fact that wars could begin again.

Mars was adored by the Romans, but they weren't the only ones

to invest in war worship.

The god had a much earlier incarnation in the society

that the Romans admired above all others,

the Greeks, whose civilisation had flourished

before Rome rose to power.

The Romans were religious magpies and, like most of their gods,

Mars was basically an amalgam of lots of older gods,

and, in a large part, stolen from the Greeks.

The Greek god of war was called Ares,

and he has prehistoric roots.

We know that he dates right the way back to the Bronze Age

from this rather brilliant bit of evidence.

What you're looking at is the image of a Linear B writing tablet.

Linear B was an early form of Greek.

This particular one was found in Knossos, on the island of Crete.

And the symbols here read "R Re."

This was found in a military arsenal, and this is our very first

evidence of Ares being actually worshipped as a god.

But there's something really interesting here because

"R Re" actually means a curse or an imprecation.

So, we know that, for the early Greeks,

the god of war was not a good thing.

Like the Romans, the Greeks could be militaristic.

And, like Mars, Ares was an ultimate embodiment

of the powerful warrior.

But, significantly, the early Greeks had a very different relationship

with their god of war.

So, for instance, these are a few lines from the Iliad,

which was the epic poem written by Homer, describing the Trojan War.

"To me, you are the most hateful of all the gods.

"Constant conflict is dear to your heart,

"wars and battles."

Those are words said by Zeus, who was actually Ares' father.

Elsewhere in the Iliad, Zeus describes Ares

as his most despised son.

For us today, this is just a myth, a good yarn.

But, 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.

These marble sculptures once adorned the east pediment,

the focal point of the Parthenon, the most spectacular temple

in 5th century classical Athens.

Gods and goddesses abound.

Like the Romans, the Greeks had a pantheon of the key gods

and goddesses, the mighty Olympians.

And, as the son of the King of the Gods, the almighty Zeus,

Ares was of prime Olympian stock.

Now, the major deities are here on this pediment.

But is Ares here?

No, he's not.

To find him, you'd have to look amongst the smaller figures

below and inside, and, even then, he's rather lost in the crowd.

And just look at him here.

Obviously, he has lost his face across time.

But, even so, he is right at the end of the line,

he's almost cowering in a corner.

Now, this whole scheme celebrates Athenian supremacy

and military dominance.

So, in theory, it's absolutely dream territory for the god of war.

Calamitous, wild Ares simply wasn't widely worshipped

in ancient Greece.

In fact, those the Greeks said were mad enough to really idolise him

were foreigners, and, worse than that,

women - the legendary warlike Amazons.

The Greeks believed that the Amazons had an intimate connection

to the god of war.

They believed that the Amazons lived right the way around the Black Sea,

and one of the islands they inhabited was called Ares Island.

They 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.

The Amazons' fabled prowess in battle and the belief

that they worshipped war didn't make them heroic

in the eyes of the Greeks.

In fact, quite the opposite.

Calling the Amazons the daughters of Ares wasn't a compliment,

it was a curse.

To find out why the Greeks were so very hostile

towards their god of war, I'm meeting Dr Lucy Jackson.

They don't worship Ares in the way that you might imagine a society

that frequently goes to war should do.

Why is that, do you think?

I think it's because they're actually all so close to war

in their daily lives.

I think it's because they know what it actually means to go to war,

that they do feel very ambivalent towards it.

In their 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.

So, it's not something you very easily glorify.

Again, one of the epithets that's often given to the god of war, Ares,

is "A bane for mankind."

And that's something that everyone can share in,

that you do not welcome his presence because his presence means death.

A lot of the gods and goddesses are pretty bellicose

in the ancient world, so what makes Ares different?

I think the epithets that he's given are often quite telling.

Zeus himself says, "Ares, you are the most hated to me"

and he gets a lot of insults thrown at him as well.

So, he is not presented in a very good light.

There's something about Ares in particular,

I think it's this wildness, the focus that he has on fear

and terror that make him not just, sort of, ambivalent and worthy

of suspicion, but, actually, outright hated.

Not just by the gods, but by mortals themselves.

Do you think that the Greeks really believed that there is a divine

force that encourages men to fight?

I think so, in the same way they were happily living alongside

divine forces and mortal forces all the time.

I think they saw them as very much interacting together.

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.

The Greeks may have been deeply wary of Ares,

but he did help reconcile the tension between war's horror

and its value.

The fact that some victories enabled some to flourish,

to act as a spur for civilisation.

As the philosopher Plato said, "A society without war

"is no more than a society fit for pigs."

Back at the British Museum, I'm investigating evidence

of how ritualising warfare helped strengthen

even the earliest prehistoric communities.

These boxes contain dozens of skeletons from around

13,000 years ago, buried together in the Sudan in what

some have called a war cemetery.

Many of the bones bear the scars of battle wounds,

the earliest evidence of organised violence

between humans on the planet.

So, who is this poor person, how much do we know about his

or her story?

It'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.

And do we know how she died?

There's evidence that she suffered multiple wounds

over a period of time.

We 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. My gosh!

What's extraordinary is that you have two bones

in your forearm, and the break has gone through both bones,

suggesting a lot of force. Yeah.

But, again, the bones have healed, so this happened before she died,

giving it time to heal.

OK, so that's not what's killed her, then?

No, this is really well fused, showing that it occurred

a long time or at least several weeks or months before she died.

So, do we know, kind of, what the mortal blow is?

It'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.

And you can see that

an impact of an arrowhead has shattered

part of the bone and part of the flint...

Oh, my God, yeah.

Part of the flint that makes up the arrowhead has been left behind,

you can see that quite clearly.

We also have two cut marks on this long bone here.

You can see one quite clearly here.

Yes. And another one here.

So, this is also likely to have been another arrowhead.

So, again, repeated episodes of violence,

which eventually is likely to have been the cause of her death.

And do we know why they're being attacked?

It's been suggested that it was competition for resources.

Imagine 13,000 years ago, the now is 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.

The fact that she's been buried so carefully,

I mean, that must say something to us?

Yeah, what's extraordinary about the cemetery is that everybody

has been carefully buried in the same manner.

For everybody to be clearly facing the south, with their heads

to the east, suggests that they were deliberately placed.

Some people have argued that maybe it was a special cemetery,

a place where people who died of violence,

maybe even warriors, where they were being buried.

The burial rites at Jebel Sahaba not only show the horrors of war

but how this community responded.

Fighting side by side in conflict, and then respecting their dead

through ritual, our early ancestors created a sense of shared identity.

Warfare had generated an idea of them and us.

So, Mars' roots, and the sacralisation of warfare, run deep.

And, here in Tunisia, there is 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.

This is what the Roman historian, Livy, wrote,

"If any nation should claim sacred origin

"and point back to divine paternity, that nation is Rome.

"She 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."

Now, Livy was a teenager when Julius Caesar was assassinated.

So, he was an eyewitness to Rome's journey from republic to empire.

And what's really fascinating is that, on that journey,

Mars gets a significant promotion - he now becomes an active part

of the imperial machine.

Evidence of why worshipping Mars was so important to Rome's

empire builders can be found in the ruins

of the ancient city of Mactaris.

100 miles south of Carthage, Mactaris was originally

a refugee settlement of Carthaginians

who fled the destruction of the Punic Wars.

Two centuries on, now part of the Roman Empire,

Mactaris had become a prosperous Roman town.

The incredible triumphal arch that still dominates the ruins

is evidence of this transformation.

While their ancestors may have been the victims

of Roman conquest, the town's citizens now celebrated

Roman military might.

And Mars was crucial to their sense of imperial belonging.

This 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.

Now, we know this for two reasons.

First of all, a statue of Mars was discovered

just here where he was adored by them and his cult.

But there was also another really intriguing bit of evidence.

Above the doorway, there was an inscribed lintel,

and, in the inscription, we read that the young men are linked

directly to Mars.

And that, crucially, Mars was linked directly

to the Roman emperor himself.

To find out why the city's youth worshipped Mars so fervently,

I'm meeting Mactaris' archaeological director,

Moheddine Chaouali, to show me the lintel

dedicated to Rome's first emperor, Augustus.

This is the inscription, is it?

This is the famous inscription.

Wow! Yeah, it's nice.

Really great!

As you see, we have a lot of names, 69 names.

And a lot of them are Punic names. Yeah.

Either they had Punic names, if not, they have Latin names,

but the name of the father is Punic.

They are the members of this association,

and the Juventus of the city of Mactar, and they are loving the god,

Mars, Augustus.

And we know that it's dedicated to Mars because I can see...

So, Martis... Yes.

That's right, Augustus, isn't it?

So, Mars as Augustus, yeah. Yeah.

This association paid for the construction of a basilica

and horrea... A grain store.

It's like a sort of grain store. Yeah.

We say that it's an association, but it's like a militia.

It is necessary to maintain order, to maintain security.

So, you have got Punic guys signing up to this Roman project?

It's important, this mix of Punic and Latin.

People here need Mars, not only for wars,

but for the prosperity of agriculture.

He's not only a god of wars, it is a god of fertility also.

So, Mars helps you to gain an empire, and to maintain

an empire? To maintain an empire, true.

It's the beginning of Romanisation, and it's important to get some

local people loving this Latin god,

it's really important.

The Mars cult here is telling - warfare, however horrific,

can bring stability, crops can grow again,

life can flourish.

Mars could be sold not just as a warmonger,

but as a peace maker.

No-one understood this better than the emperor, Augustus.

Augustus had this coin minted after he founded a new temple,

the Temple of Mars Ultor - Mars the Avenger -

right in the very heart of the Roman Forum.

Basically, this was a kind of a sanctuary of war

and of imperial military might.

It's where commanders would assemble before they left on campaign,

and it's where victorious generals returned

after they triumphed abroad.

As Mars Ultor, the avenger, the god combined the Empire's

aggression with its desire for order in its conquered territories.

Rome wanted to exploit new fertile lands,

not scorched earth.

So, as a god of fertility and agriculture, Mars was key

to prosperity - to the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome.

I'm heading to the Roman city of Thysdrus, now called El Djem,

in eastern Tunisia.

Thysdrus grew rich from the production of olive oil,

enjoying the fruits of Roman peace and stability.

Its citizens were able to build gorgeous monuments that rivalled

the very best in the city of Rome itself.

Its spectacular amphitheatre seated 35,000 spectators,

second only to Rome's great Colosseum.

It was in arenas like this across the Empire that Mars' roles

as patron of bloodshed and as peacekeeper were combined.

After Augustus had founded his temple of Mars Ultor,

he inaugurated the Ludi Martialis, the annual games of Mars.

From all accounts, these were horrifically spectacular events.

We're told that hundreds of lions and crocodiles were slaughtered,

that the Battle of Salamis was re-enacted.

And, of course, there were gladiatorial contests,

with the combatants praying to Mars before they fought.

So, basically, these were glorious festivals of death.

Gladiators were even seen as soldiers of Mars,

and some amphitheatres had sanctuaries to worship the god.

One particularly successful gladiator was celebrated

as being the embodiment of the martial spirit -

Hermes, the martial delight of our age, Hermes the glory

of Mars universal.

The origins of gladiatorial games were religious,

a dramatic form of sacrifice,

literally making something sacred by killing it.

These blood sports satisfied both a deep human desire

for ritualised death, and were a living demonstration

of Rome's imperial might.

But a new form of sacrificial victim, who believed in a new god,

was soon to be found in the sands at El Djem and across North Africa,

and, indeed, the rest of the Empire - martyred Christians.

Whereas 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.

We're told that on 12th March, 295 AD,

a young man called Maximilianus was brought here

so that he could become part of the army.

The proconsul agreed to take him on,

but Maximilianus very politely refused,

saying that he couldn't fight because he was a Christian.

The proconsul flew into a rage and threatened all kinds

of punishments and a horrific death.

To their surprise, Maximilianus simply said,

"Bring it on - I cannot fight for the world, only for the Lord."

Aged 21 years, three months, and 18 days,

Maximilianus was then beheaded.

He is possibly the first recorded incidence

of a conscientious objector.

But war was far too central to the success of Rome

for the protest of one minority cult to dent Mars' armour.

And, just a generation later, when Constantine,

a Roman emperor himself, took up the Christian faith,

war worship endured.

The fact that Constantine became a Christian had surprisingly

little impact on the status of Mars.

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 signo Vinces."

"Under this sign, you shall conquer" which is hardly very pacifist.

And then the theme continues.

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.

And, even 20 years later, once his son is in power,

there's another coin minted here, and this show's a Christian warrior,

and we know it's Christian because it has the Chi-Rho symbol,

the symbol of Christ, in his standard.

But this looks pretty much exactly like Mars,

the god of war.

Rome had successfully co-opted Christianity

into the imperial mission.

But there was a theological tension.

In the 4th century, what's now Tunisia became

an important centre in the newly Christianised Roman Empire.

And it still has a small community of Christian worshippers here today.

Father Silvio Moreno explained to me how Christian teaching

challenged martial precepts.

The war god should have been dead and buried, but even

a Christianised Roman Empire needed to fight to keep Christ's

Earthly territory intact.

Now, conveniently, ancient authors - Aristotle,

Cicero and the like - had eloquently laid out

philosophical justifications for divinely sanctioned war.

Saint Augustine, who studied these classical works,

offered a solution.

He stated that wars could be just, that it was right to fight,

as long as the battle was sanctioned by the one, true God.

Because most people think of Christianity as, on paper,

being a peaceful religion, so, their ideas

of love thy neighbour, and turn your other cheek, is there anything,

do you think, in the New Testament that actually justifies

the use of violence?

Backed up by Saint Augustine's just war theory, Christians now

had licence to kill, without compromising their faith.

While the warlike Mars was also a god of peace time,

ironically, the peaceful Christian deity had become a god of war.

In the 11th century, the Christian church would put

this theory into practice, embarking on the Crusades,

centuries of holy war to reclaim the holy lands

from Muslim possession.

And Mars, the god of war, not only survived in spirit,

but in name.

There is no doubt that Mars was in the minds of these men.

When William Marshal, who was probably the most famous

of all crusading knights, he was a celebrity in his own day,

and he fought against Saladin, when he died, he had these words

inscribed around his tomb -

"Miles eram Martis."

"I was a soldier of Mars."

The Crusades saw waves of Christian soldiers head to the holy lands...

..fighting the cause of holy war.

And that influence can be tracked down here in Jordan.

Dating to 1115, this splendid fortress, Shobak,

was the first castle built by these crusading knights,

a stronghold from which Christian soldiers could launch their just

and righteous military mission.

But, by all accounts, one of the Christian rulers of Shobak

had forgotten all codes of chivalry.

Raynald of Chatillon had a reputation for being

a bullying robber-knight.

By all accounts, he sounds like a dangerously clever psychopath.

He used to kill his enemies by putting their heads in wooden boxes

and then throwing them off the battlements

so that they stayed fully conscious, right through the moments

that their bodies were being destroyed.

In theory, just war precluded the evils of war,

love of violence.

But this was as brutal as any conflict fought

on the fields of Mars.

From this castle, Raynald attacked a group of Muslim travellers

who were making their way across this landscape

to the holy city of Medina.

He stole their treasure and enslaved or slaughtered the pilgrims.

Today, considering Raynald's actions, it's hard to reconcile

the savagery that took place at Shobak and elsewhere

with the notion of a just, or holy, war.

Until you understand the medieval mind-set.

In what was called the Book of Knighthood, one medieval author,

Christine de Pizan, set out the guidelines

for being a good Christian knight.

And Mars gets a really surprisingly prominent shout out.

"Mars, the god of battle, may well be called the Son of God.

"And every knight that loveth and showeth alms and deeds

"of knighthood may be called a Son of Mars."

For crusading Christian knights,

sacralising war had justified their actions.

But they weren't alone in thinking that God was on their side.

After experiencing the initial savagery of the Christians,

the medieval Muslim fighters increasingly believed

that they, too, were engaged in a righteous struggle

- a jihad.

One Muslim who fought in the Crusades, and who fell in battle,

was buried with these words inscribed on his tomb.

He was described as

"A sword of those who fight the holy war,

"Leader of the armies of the Muslims,

"Vanquisher of the infidels and the polytheists."

On other tombs, men are described as martyrs,

they've gained immortality

and enduring pleasure in the afterlife.

Ironically, Christian writers refer to Muslims

as "mere worshippers of Mars."

Both sides claimed the other were pagans,

and that they were doing God's will.

It wouldn't be until the 15th century that the legitimisation

of war under a sacred banner was really challenged.

The Dutch philosopher, Erasmus, was particularly vocal.

Erasmus didn't believe that any war could be justified

simply because you kidded yourself that you had God on your side.

As he rather neatly puts it,

"Who does not think his own cause just?

"Who can lack a pretext for going to war?"

And to buttress his anti-war rhetoric, he refers directly back

to the Greeks and to Homer, who he draws inspiration from.

Homer coins a new word to describe the god of war,

"Allo pros allos" - on one side and then the other.

And he applies it to Mars because he is two-faced,

he favours one side and then the other.

There is no allegiance with Mars, he simply cannot be relied on.

As Erasmus says, "Alike to all is the god of war,

"And slays the slayer in turn."

Erasmus was writing during the Renaissance,

when artists and philosophers used classical figures to question

centuries' worth of received wisdom.

Through the figure of Mars, they asked whether warfare

was indeed an essential part of the human condition.

From Botticelli's famous painting, Mars and Venus, where the bellicose

Mars is lulled by his paramour,

to Veronese's Mars and Venus,

united by love, they asked whether there was any point

to any war, holy or otherwise.

I'm visiting the National Gallery in London to explore how these ideas

played out in politics.

In 1618, Europe became embroiled in a devastating sectarian war

between rival Catholic and Protestant states

that would last 30 years and see 8 million lose their lives.

Attempts were made to broker peace, and, in 1629, the artist Rubens

was sent to England, not just as a painter,

but as a diplomatic peace envoy.

It's an amazing painting, this.

And it feels like there's all kinds of messages going on.

Yes, this is definitely a very, very busy painting.

So, in a way, I think that the heart of the composition is this figure

of peace, who we see here, feeding her son with milk.

But, really, the whole picture, in a way, is about the benefits

of peace and the richness that comes with that.

So, there's this lovely satyr leaning in the foreground,

offering the children this rich cornucopia,

literally overflowing with all the different kinds of fruit.

There is the most amazing, playful leopard, and the satyr

and the leopard - they're really wild creatures.

You know, normally, they'd be dangerous, they'd be a threat.

But, here, because peace is so governing everything,

they've become playful and subdued.

So, it's a kind of real elegy

to all the benefits of peace

and how widespread those are.

And this is Mars here, who is being banished,

he's being pushed out of the painting? Yeah, absolutely.

So, the figure who we see behind peace is Minerva,

goddess of wisdom, and she is pushing Mars away.

So, his kind of black suit of armour there,

he's being banished, along with these, kind of,

ethereal, strange furies that go with him, probably symbolising

pestilence and famine and all the horrors

that come along with warfare.

Actually, what we see in the foreground are all

the benefits of peace when Mars isn't allowed to interfere.

It's usual for people to use classical figures in a, kind of,

allegorical way like this.

But what is particularly personal about this...

Because it kind of feels like a very passionate picture.

It is, I think this is a very passionate,

and very, very personal picture.

So, this is a picture that Rubens paints when he's in London,

he's actually here, kind of, with two hats on.

On the one hand, he is here as a diplomat,

so, he's been sent by the Spanish court to,

kind of, open peace negotiations.

On the other, he's here working as an artist.

And this painting comes from the meeting of those joint missions,

from the diplomatic and the artistic, and he creates

this painting as a gift to the king, really,

kind of, summing up in paint what it is he's arguing for in person.

And he has witnessed some real horrors during this war?

He has.

He is someone who has really lived with the traumas of what war brings,

especially in his home city of Antwerp, which really,

really suffered during this period.

Do you think...

You know, it's easy to say that you want peace.

Do you think that he thinks it is a possibility?

I think absolutely, and I think more even

than just a possibility.

I think he is making the argument here that it's absolutely

a prerogative because, although this is a painting

very much about all the classical figures and the classical allegories

that are taking place, there's also, really, at the heart

of the composition this group of lovely children

who are so tenderly painted, so beautiful with their wide eyes.

It's the children, of course, who are going to be damaged by war.

We know that these children are based on the children

of the person Rubens was staying with in London.

So, I think there is this, kind of, heartfelt plea to take the path

of wisdom rather than of warfare.

Genuinely felt as a work of art. Absolutely.

When Rubens painted Mars again in his Horrors Of War

ten years later, the buoyant optimism had faded.

Europe was still steeped in blood.

In this painting, Mars charges forth,

trampling books representing wisdom.

Venus tries to hold him back in vain, and his accompanying furies

take centre stage, ravaging the cowering victims

at their feet.

Using the ancient god as a symbol of the chaos and destruction of war

had 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, the figure of Mars was used once again,

to promote the idea that warmongering was a route

to peace and prosperity.

Now, this is one of the most ambitious and bellicose

empire builders of the 19th century - it's Napoleon Bonaparte.

But, here, slightly larger than he was in real life,

and heroically naked, this is Napoleon

depicting himself as Mars.

But what's really interesting is that this isn't Mars,

the chaotic, bloodthirsty god of war.

This is Mars the peacemaker.

And we mustn't forget that Mars had children called Panic and Fear,

but he also had a daughter named Harmony.

And what this statue is doing is playing on that idea that conflict

is something that allows societies not just to survive but to thrive.

Napoleon celebrated Mars as a bringer of order,

just as the Romans had done 2,000 years before.

He might have styled himself a latter-day Roman conqueror,

with territories stretching across the Mediterranean

and Middle East.

But the gifts of this war were not peace, but churn and change.

As one ancient philosopher put it,

"War is a catalyst, the Father and King of all.

"Some, war has made gods.

"Some, slaves."

Conflicts between European nations were now escalating to engulf

the globe in the most devastating war the world had ever seen.

I'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.

So, just that one inscription above us -

"49,076 of the Royal Regiment of Artillery

"gave their lives for King and country in the Great War",

that's from one regiment.

The numbers tell their own dreadful story.

I 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.

I mean, they do feel that they are, in some way, doing God's will.

Very much so. The war was seen, I think, by the great majority

of people in Britain in August 1914 as a moral crusade.

But, 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.

Asquith, the Prime Minister himself, was a great classical scholar.

Others, we think of General Ian Hamilton,

who was in charge of the Gallipoli campaign.

These were men for whom Mars was almost a living presence.

Everybody, even to this day, is familiar with the moustachioed

figure of Kitchener, pointing, saying, "Your country needs you."

Alan Muirhead described how this poster was everywhere

in Britain, this is Kitchener like the face of Mars himself.

This is the cap badge from the Artists Rifles.

Mars and Minerva. Yes.

And the Artists Rifles was used as the Officer Training Corps.

And, 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.

These were young men who had been to public school,

were steeped in the classical tradition.

Their whole frame of reference for understanding public affairs,

politics, government, and, of course, the business

of warfare, was classical.

So, these are fighters who have believed in the heroic

ideal of a soldier, and that's something

which is very classical.

You see that slipping away as the war continues. Yes.

There is an increasingly growing sense of cynicism and disillusion.

This, of course, we're, I think, most familiar with through the work

of some of the war poets.

Wilfred 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

who were trying to...

..using classical ideals, trying to suggest that it was such

a sweet and a good thing to die for your country.

By 1918, after four gruelling years, it's estimated that

37 million people had died across the globe.

As monuments to the dead were built in civic centres

up and down the country, Mars was no longer upheld

as a bringer of peace.

This arch was built to commemorate the 585 men from the London

and South Western Railway who sacrificed their lives

in the Great War.

Now, up at the top, you've got a triumphant figure of Britannia.

But what's really interesting are the two sculptures underneath.

On the left, there's the female figure of the goddess Bellona.

Bellona was none other

than the wife of the great war god, Mars.

Bellona was not a creature to be messed with,

even in the ancient world, people feared her.

Her adorants had to slash their arms and their legs in her honour,

and she is surrounded by these ghoulish figures.

But what happens then is very interesting.

When you move to 1918, suddenly, the representation is of Athena.

Athena, the goddess of wisdom and peace

and righteous judgment and victory.

The idea is that people have learnt from the horrors of the Great War

that war is not necessarily a good thing.

Mars, perhaps, has to be left behind, and, instead,

women and men have to pursue the cause of peace and wisdom.

But, just two decades later, those hopes would be dashed.

Between 1939 and 1945, it's thought that up to 85 million

were the casualties of war.

Over 200,000 dying when the atomic bombs fell.

If World War I hadn't been able to kill off Mars,

surely the scale and horrors of World War II would?

Anti-war polemics were increasingly produced.

This was published in 1945, just three months after

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And it's entitled The Eternal Art, Being A Speech Made By Mars

In His Own Defence As God Of War.

"I consider this to be a propitious moment to talk to you frankly.

"Because it seems to me the time has come at last to dispense

"with my services forever.

"Your feverish, scientific progress is making my work increasingly

"strenuous in my old age.

"I want to retire.

"There isn't even any vestige of sport left in what I do.

"You yourselves, through the atom bomb,

"have provided me with the means to destroy the world

"without a fight.

"For your own sakes, I sincerely hope that this is my swansong."

The threat of nuclear Armageddon gripped the world's imagination

with fear and dread.

Mars would get a new outing, no longer an object of worship,

but of terror.

These are just two posters from a whole plethora of films

that came out in the '50s and '60s,

and that absolutely packed out movie theatres.

Now, on the face of it, the theme is just a common one,

it's all about the Red Planet and the threat from Mars.

But what's really interesting that this isn't just sci-fi,

blockbuster fantasy - there's a really serious, political undertone.

For the threat from the Red Planet - read "the red scare" -

and for the Martians - belligerent, unpredictable,

militaristic - read "the communists."

Now, this is something that has been going on since antiquity.

We have to create an outsider, an other.

We have to turn us into us and them.

From Hiroshima onwards, when weapons of mass destruction

offer godlike powers, is there still room

for a god in war?

I'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.

Regimented training bears some of the hallmarks of ritual

and spectacle that the ancients would have appreciated.

And these young women and men still parade under the gaze of Mars.

That'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.

I'm meeting Army Chaplain Andrew Totten to ask him

about his direct experience of war and religion

in the British military.

You walk in here under those brilliant figures of Mars,

the god of war, and Minerva, the goddess of wisdom,

on the pediment.

Do you think they actually mean something to the officers

who train and have trained here?

I think there is that desire to look back to your classical roots,

to look back to Rome, to look back to Athens.

The really interesting thing is when you get Jerusalem

coming into it as well.

So, those classical gods - what does it mean when you bring

into the figure of Mars, for example, the figure of Christ,

not an avenging God but a suffering God?

There are classical references everywhere,

there is a huge banner there, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori",

"sweet and right it is to die for your fatherland."

The men, and then the women, who have trained here,

again, do you think that these references are something

that they've carried with them, that they've taken with them

onto the battlefield, or into active service?

I think modern officer cadets are probably more shocked to see

that quotation from Horace via Wilfred Owen's interpretation,

obviously, of the pity of war.

And, of course, war is a pitiable thing.

Do you think there can be ever such a thing as a sacred war?

No.

War can't be sacred.

But the foundational principles of the British law of armed conflict

include those of humanity, of reducing suffering.

So, it's life, not war, that is sacred.

As a historian, I see, through recorded time,

men who have been happy to call themselves soldiers of Mars.

Is this a tradition that you can imagine continuing into the future?

If you see that as the warrior tradition,

yes, that is alive.

You'll find warriors in every regiment,

certainly, every combat regiment of the British Army.

Some people say that there is a similar intensity

to being in active service, to fighting on the battlefield,

and a religious experience.

I think certainly of a particular patrol in Afghanistan,

where the soldiers came under ambush.

And, in the course of that, had to respond, and begin to

fight back against the enemy.

I have never seen soldiers happier, more professionally fulfilled,

where there was the sense of their discipline,

their training, their skills, all coming together.

At the same time as trying to protect any innocent people

who may have been in that particular battle space.

So, there is almost that kind of rapture that can happen in combat.

What about you?

You're obviously a man of faith, you're also a man of war.

How do you reconcile those two impulses in your life?

I don't think you ever completely, emotionally, reconcile them.

I don't think you should.

I think you need to keep the sensitivity

to all those ambiguities within it.

Horrible things happen in war,

the most ghastly things happen in that respect.

And that's where it leaves that sense of lasting ambiguity -

you know that you're doing something that needs to be done

but it may still, in its own essence,

be something that is evil.

As 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.

His raging spirit can bring rapture.

And his military might deliver the benefits of peace,

prosperity, and order.

Surely, that is partly why we've sacralised war.

Why, as the Greeks put it,

men love the lamentable works of Ares.

Because the uncomfortable truth is that battle

can benefit societies.

But, today, with annihilation possible at the push of a button,

and with the passions of holy wars still running high,

we have to embrace the idea that immortal Mars will have

no domain to rule over, unless we accept that

it is not war that is sacred, but life.