Mamers is the war god of the Oscan-speaking Samnites, Campanians and their kin, the Sabellic counterpart of the Roman Mars. His name survives most famously in that of the Mamertini, the 'sons of Mamers', a band of Campanian mercenaries whose seizure of Messana around 289 BCE later helped precipitate the First Punic War. Mamers was the chief recipient of the ver sacrum, the foundational Italic rite in which a people vowed the human and animal offspring of one spring to the god; when grown, the consecrated youths were sent out to found new settlements, led by a totemic animal. The Samnites traced their arrival in the southern Apennines to a bull sent by Mamers, while the Hirpini took their name from his wolf, making the god the patron of Sabellic migration and colonisation as well as of war.