Ares

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.

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.