Bellona- Roman GodDeity

The Columna Bellica

Outside Bellona's temple in the Campus Martius stood a small pillar called the columna bellica. When Rome declared war on a distant enemy, a fetial priest came to this pillar, raised a cornel-wood spear, and hurled it over the column into a plot of land beyond. That plot represented enemy territory. Livy records that the Romans had purchased it from a soldier in Pyrrhus's army so the ritual could be performed against overseas enemies who had no border to receive the spear. One throw, and the war had divine sanction.

The temple itself stood outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary that no armed commander could cross before his triumph. Returning generals waited there. The Senate convened in Bellona's precinct to hear their reports and receive foreign ambassadors, keeping the business of war at war's own threshold.

Mars's Charioteer

Roman tradition named Bellona as Mars's companion, variously his sister, wife, or charioteer. What held constant was her place beside him in battle. On the shield that Vulcan forged for Aeneas, as Virgil describes it in the Aeneid, Bellona follows the armies with a bloody whip. Statius in the Thebaid puts her in the same role: she goads the horses of war and steers the carnage where Mars leads.

Her name comes from bellum, war. Varro traces it to an older form, Duellona, from duellum. She was not named for any story or parentage. She was named for the thing itself.

The Bellonarii

Bellona's priests were called the Bellonarii, and their worship looked nothing like the sober rites of other Roman priesthoods. On her festival day, the dies sanguinis, they slashed their arms and legs with swords or knives, caught the blood in cupped hands, and drank it or splattered it on bystanders. Tibullus describes them dancing in frenzy, prophesying while covered in their own blood. They wore black robes.

The sight disturbed other Romans. But the Bellonarii persisted for centuries, their rituals tolerated in a city that understood what war cost.