Ares

The Unloved Son

Ares is the son of Zeus and Hera, one of the few major Olympians with both parents inside the marriage ³. It does him no good. When he comes to his father wounded in Iliad 5, Zeus answers with the harshest speech any god receives in Homer: of all the gods on Olympus, Ares is the most hateful to him, because strife and wars and fighting are forever dear to him — and only the fact that he is Zeus' own son keeps him out of Tartarus ¹.

That verdict sets the tone. Where Athena embodies war as skill, discipline and the intelligence that wins, Ares embodies the part of war that cannot be made useful: the noise, the panic and the killing ^1,7. Homer's epithets for him are relentlessly physical — "manslaughtering", "insatiate of battle", "bane of mortals" — and never wise, never just ¹.

Defeats in Homer

Homer humiliates him repeatedly. In Book 5 Diomedes drives a spear into his belly with Athena leaning on the shaft, and Ares bellows with the voice of nine or ten thousand men before fleeing to Olympus to complain ¹. In Book 21 Athena knocks him down with a boundary stone, and he covers seven acres where he falls; when Aphrodite tries to lead him away, Athena knocks her down too ¹. Earlier tradition adds the giants Otus and Ephialtes, who bound Ares in a bronze jar for thirteen months until Hermes stole him out, half-dead ^1,8.

The Odyssey supplies the comic version. Ares takes Aphrodite, wife of Hephaestus, as his lover; the smith forges an invisible net, catches them in the act, and summons the gods to see ². The affair is nonetheless productive: their children include Harmonia, who marries Cadmus, and the personified terrors Deimos and Phobos — Rout and Fear — who yoke his chariot ^1,3.

Cult and Territory

The old textbook line that Ares had almost no cult is an overstatement. He had real worship, and it clustered in specific places: Thebes, whose founding myth turns on Cadmus killing the dragon of Ares and sowing its teeth; Sparta and Crete, where his name appears in oath formulas alongside other gods; and various sanctuaries in Arcadia and Asia Minor ^6,7,8. Thrace, in the poets, is his homeland — a way of placing the god beyond the civilised frontier, and probably not a memory of any actual Thracian cult ⁷.

Athens is the revealing case. The Areopagus, the "hill of Ares" beside the Acropolis, took its name from a trial: Ares killed Halirrhothius, son of Poseidon, for assaulting his daughter Alcippe, and was tried by the other gods on that spot and acquitted — the mythical charter of the Athenian homicide court ^5,6. Yet Athens had no early temple of Ares in its centre; the one that stood in the Agora in Roman times had been physically moved there from elsewhere in Attica under Augustus ^6,7.

Children and the Heroic World

Ares' offspring in myth run to the violent and the monstrous: Cycnus, who built a temple from the skulls of travellers and was killed by Heracles; Diomedes of Thrace, whose mares ate human flesh; and, in the traditions most often followed, the Amazons, including Penthesilea and Hippolyta, who are called his daughters ^3,5,8. He also fathers Phlegyas and, with Aphrodite, the line that leads to Thebes.

His constant companions are Enyo, a goddess of the battle-cry, and Eris, Strife, who according to Hesiod grows from small beginnings until her head strikes the sky ^1,3. The late Homeric Hymn to Ares, which reads more like a philosophical prayer than an archaic one, asks him instead for the courage to keep the peace — evidence of how much the god's image shifted by the end of antiquity ⁴.

Ares and Mars

Roman readers routinely equated Ares with Mars, and translators still do, but the two are not the same figure. Mars was an ancient Italic god of agriculture and boundaries as well as war, father of Romulus and Remus, second only to Jupiter in the state cult, and honoured with festivals across the calendar ⁷. Ares was never a founder, never a patron of the city, and never respectable.

That is arguably his function. The Greeks needed a name for what war actually is once the speeches are over, and they gave it a god they were free to despise — while still swearing by him, and still marching ^1,7,8.