Ares is war stripped of everything the Greeks valued in it. Where Athena represents disciplined strategy and the defence of the city, Ares is slaughter, bloodlust and the chaos of the battlefield, and the Greeks regarded him with more fear than affection. Homer makes the judgement explicit: in the Iliad Zeus tells his son to his face that he is the most hateful of all the gods, a lover of strife and battle for their own sake. Ares is wounded on the field by a mortal, Diomedes, guided by Athena, and flees bellowing back to Olympus, a scene that captures how Greek myth liked to see raw force humbled by intelligence.
Ares appears already in the Linear B tablets of Bronze Age Knossos, his name written a-re, which makes him, like Dionysus and Hermes, a god attested in Greek religion for well over three thousand years, long before Homer gave him his hateful reputation. Ancient geography reflected the same judgement Homer voiced: Greek writers located Ares's true home not in civilised Greece but among the wild tribes of Thrace to the north, treating the war god as, in a sense, a foreigner even in his own pantheon. Athens named its ancient council, the Areopagus, the hill of Ares, after the trial held there in myth, when Ares was judged by the other gods for killing Poseidon's son Halirrhothius and acquitted, a founding legend for the site's later role as a homicide court.