Prayer to Mars

The first lines of the third book of the Fasti, the book of March. The god of the month is summoned, having first been asked to disarm.

Depositis clipeo paulisper et hasta … nitidas casside solve comas — laying aside for a little your shield and spear, loose your gleaming hair from the helmet. Mars is asked to take off his armour before entering the poem, and the request is not devotional but generic. The Fasti are written in elegiac couplets — the metre of love poetry — and a warlike god is cramped in it. Ovid says so outright a few lines later: what has Mars to do with an unwarlike poet?

Paulisper, for a little while, is an honest qualification: the god is not being remade, only detained for the length of a reading.

Nitidas … comas — gleaming, oiled hair. The vocabulary of a dandy; the moment Mars' hair is released from the helmet the poet combs it into the fashion of his own genre. The god enters elegy having made himself presentable.