Neptune Creates the First Horse

The trident strikes the earth and the horse comes out.

This is the moment that establishes Neptune’s double nature — the sea god who is also the god of horses, the deity who governs the unpredictable force of the ocean and the unpredictable force of the animal that Rome’s military power depends on. The trident that stirs the sea is the same trident that splits the earth to release the horse; both acts express the same divine force, the power that moves in waves and in hoofbeats.

In the Greek version that Rome inherited and adapted, Poseidon and Athena compete for the patronage of Athens. Poseidon strikes the Acropolis with his trident and a salt spring erupts — or a horse springs up, depending on the version. Athena strikes the ground and an olive tree grows. The judges award Athens to Athena because the olive is more useful than the horse or the salt water. Poseidon withdraws, furious.

Rome is not interested in this judgment. Rome has a different set of priorities. The horse is useful for war. The horse is useful for the races in the Circus Maximus that are the center of Roman public entertainment. The horse is what the Roman cavalry rides and the Roman cavalry is what the Republic used to dominate central Italy. Neptune who gives the horse is a generous and practically valuable god.

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The sea connection is not an inconvenience for Rome. It is essential.

Rome began as a land power — a city on a river in a peninsula, with no particular naval tradition. Then the First Punic War forced Rome to build a navy from nothing to fight Carthage’s experienced fleet. Within a generation, Rome had the largest navy in the Mediterranean. The god of the sea was, for the Romans of the late Republic, as important as the god of war.

Neptune’s temple near the Circus Flaminius in the Campus Martius was a place where naval victories were celebrated. After the battle of Actium — the sea battle that ended the civil wars and gave Augustus sole control of the Roman world — the political significance of the sea god was immense: the man who controlled Rome controlled the Mediterranean, and Neptune’s divine sanction was worth having.

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The October Horse is the most archaic Roman rite connecting Neptune to Roman military culture.

On October 15th, at the end of the military season, a chariot race is held on the Campus Martius — the Field of Mars. The right-hand horse of the winning chariot is sacrificed to Mars. But there is a fight over its severed head between the inhabitants of two Rome neighborhoods: the Sacra Via and the Subura. The head is nailed to the wall of the Regia (the ancient residence of the rex sacrorum) or to the Turris Mamilia.

The right-hand horse of the winning chariot: this is Neptune’s special animal, the horse of the outside lane, the horse that pulls hardest. It is sacrificed to Mars in October because the military season is closing. Its blood is kept by the Vestal Virgins and added to the purification mixture used in the Parilia (the festival of shepherd purification) the following April.

The horse’s sacred substance moves through the year’s ritual cycle from October through April, connecting the end of the war season to the beginning of the spring season, connecting Mars to the Vestals to Neptune to the pastoral god Pales in a chain of ritual continuity that reveals the deep structure of Roman religion: the gods are not isolated in their temples. They are interconnected through the calendar, through the substances that move between their cults, through the ritual chain that holds the year together.

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Neptune is not Jupiter’s equal.

He is the god of the second element — the sea is vast and powerful and genuinely terrifying to people who sail it, but it does not govern everything the way the sky does. Neptune governs the edge, the boundary between land and sea, the place where Rome’s power met its limit and where the unpredictable operated. He governs the earthquake — Neptune Shaker of the Earth is his most ancient epithet — because the Romans understood (without geological theory) that earthquake and sea were connected, that the same force that moved in waves on the surface moved in vibrations below.

The horse came out of that force. It has the sea’s qualities: power, speed, beauty, and the absolute potential for destruction if mishandled. The Romans honored both in the same god, and they raced the horse every March and October to mark the boundaries of the season that the god of forces governs.