Templo Martis Ultoris Painting

The Temple of Mars was built by Emperor Augustus on the Roman Forum, and quickly became the business centre of the city. The Temple of Mars – the temple of the god of war – continues to support a thriving business, the business of weaponry and death. The Temple of Mars has shed its Corinthian columns for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM), which support its financial activity while foretelling a grim future. For the Temple of Mars is the future of humanity. Threatened by totalitarian ideologies, illustrated by the Nazi motto and the Leninist flag, men continue the tradition of war inherited from Achilles - ‘you are a great fighter’ recognizes Odysseus. And war brings great profits: money supports the entire activity. It makes little difference what the human cost actually is: war has ‘hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters’, and Achilles himself has lost his love, Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons, whom he killed. Now, it is his turn to die on the pediment of the temple. The Temple of Mars reveals the falsehood of our beliefs – ‘truth titillates far less the imagination than fiction’ tells us Donatien de Sade - and the omens of death that permeate our destiny. The V2 rocket stands ready to launch, while another rocket is ‘Satan’. The French one reveals that the laudable aims of liberty, fraternity, and equality were promoted through the guillotine. The Magadan rocket is the sad testament to modern men’s subjugation to the slavery of ideologies under the name of justice. Yet, Plato tells us in Gorgias that ‘justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior’. Thus the ideologies of destruction, ISIS, and the words of the Futurist Movement appear on the temple. A silent drone drops a bomb on an invisible target. The result is death: death of the hero, Achilles, death of the queen, Penthesilea, death of the inmate assassinated by a Nazi officer, and death of the masses of people mowed down by war. Below the ground, fracturing from so much inhumanity, flows a river of blood, the victims walk into Hell, into Hades, and the gates of Auschwitz have been repurposed with the words of Dante Alighieri ‘lasciate ogni speranza’, abandon all hope. Lives that were once promising are being reduced to nothingness. We are in Aleppo. The temple is adorned by two men who have been eager contributors to the columns of wasted humans walking into Hades: Christopher Columbus, who oversaw the massacre of thousands of American Natives (he was charged with mass murder by the Spanish king), and Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution, a man for whom, in the words of Walter Schellenberg, ‘truth and goodness had no intrinsic meaning.’ In the end, all ideologies either fail or pass. Even the terror of Islamists will pass, because like their attempt to master the technology of ICBMs, their ideology is flawed. And what is going on behind the closed doors of the temple? The naos was off limits to anyone but the temple priests, and it remains closed to us, keeping the secret of how Mars entertains and rewards his most initiated worshippers.