Aphrodite's Lover, and Rome's Different Mars

For all his unpopularity Ares is bound into the web of Olympian story, most famously as the lover of Aphrodite; in a tale sung in the Odyssey, her husband Hephaestus traps the pair in an unbreakable net and exposes them to the laughter of the gods. From this union myth derived Harmonia, and through her the founding line of Thebes. It is worth marking how differently Rome treated the same figure. The Roman Mars was no despised outsider but a central and dignified god, second only to Jupiter, a father of Romulus and Remus and a guardian of the state and its fields. The Greek and Roman war gods were formally identified with one another, yet the values attached to them were nearly opposite.

Ares had few great temples of his own, an absence noted since antiquity and consistent with the marginal cult that matched his marginal moral standing among the Olympians; the small Classical temple long shown at the Athenian Agora and popularly called the Hephaisteion was in fact reassembled there in the Augustan period as a temple of Ares, moved stone by stone from elsewhere, a rare case of a whole Greek temple being physically relocated. In art he is regularly shown fully armoured, helmeted and bearing spear and shield, and his Roman counterpart's far grander cult, with Mars ranked second only to Jupiter and honoured as father of Rome's founders, remains the clearest ancient example of the same god receiving opposite treatment in two neighbouring cultures.