Ares

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Ares embodies the raw frenzy, bloodlust, and physical courage of open battle, the savage face of war as opposed to its strategy.
Role in Mythos: He is the Olympian god of war, son of Zeus and Hera, who personifies combat’s brutality and stands as the dark counterpart to the disciplined warcraft of Athena.
Relation to Humans: Ares could fill mortal fighters with the nerve to hold a line of spears and the frenzy to keep killing once it broke, and warriors invoked him for courage before battle. Yet he was widely distrusted and received far less temple worship than his rivals, honored most in martial regions such as Sparta and his imagined Thracian homeland.

The sound came first. Bronze grinding against bronze, the scream of horses, men calling for their mothers into the dust. Where that noise rose loudest and a battle stopped being a contest and became a slaughter, Ares was already there, on foot among the dying and in no hurry to leave.

He came armored, always. A tall warrior in a crested helmet, a heavy round shield on one arm, a spear in his fist, sometimes mounted in a chariot pulled by horses whose breath smelled of smoke. The Greeks never settled on one face for him. On some painted vases he is a bearded veteran, on others a nude youth wearing nothing but a helmet, as if war could be young and beautiful and still leave the field covered in entrails. Two figures usually rode with him: his sons Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Terror, and beside them Eris, who was strife itself, and Enyo, a goddess who sacked cities. They were less an entourage than a weather system.

His parents were Zeus and Hera, which made him heir to the most powerful household in the cosmos and welcome in almost none of it. Most accounts call him their son outright. One tradition has Hera conceive him alone, without Zeus, by the touch of a magical flower, a quiet act of spite in a marriage full of them. However he came into being, the result was a god nobody much wanted. In the Iliad, Zeus looks at his own son and tells him plainly that of all the gods on Olympus he is the most hateful, that he loves only strife and war and slaughter. It is a remarkable thing for a father to say. Ares heard it and kept doing what he did.

Set against him stood his half-sister Athena, and the contrast was the entire point. She was war as planning, discipline, the well-timed maneuver and the city defended. He was war as it actually felt from inside the press of bodies: blind, loud, and indifferent to who won. The Greeks honored her in marble across the Acropolis. Him they approached more carefully, and further north, in Thrace, which they liked to imagine as his cold and violent homeland.

The most famous story about Ares is not a battle at all. He took Aphrodite, married to the smith-god Hephaestus, as his lover, and the two were not discreet. Helios, who sees everything from the sky, carried the news to her husband. Hephaestus said nothing. He went to his forge and hammered out a net of chains so fine they hung invisible in the air and so strong nothing could tear them, then draped them over the bed and pretended to leave on a journey. When the lovers lay down, the metal closed over them, cold and inescapable. Hephaestus called the other gods in to look. They came, and they laughed, and the laughter was the punishment.

For all his ferocity, Ares lost a great deal. The Aloadae, two giant brothers, ambushed him, bound him, and stuffed him into a bronze jar, where he stayed crammed in the dark for thirteen months until Hermes worked him loose, half-suffocated and humiliated. On the plain of Troy the mortal hero Diomedes drove a spear into his belly, guided by Athena’s hand, and the god of war bellowed with the voice of ten thousand men and bolted up to Olympus to complain about the wound. Athena herself once knocked him flat with a boulder. He covered seven acres of ground when he fell.

He left children scattered through the myths. Phobos and Deimos rode at his side. Harmonia, his daughter by Aphrodite, became the bride of Cadmus, and that wedding tangled Ares into the founding of Thebes. A dragon sacred to him guarded a spring there until Cadmus killed it. Athena told the hero to sow its teeth, and from the furrows rose armed men who cut each other down until five remained, the ancestors of the Theban nobility. For spilling the blood of his serpent, Ares bound Cadmus to eight years of servitude before handing over his daughter as the price of peace.

There was one trial he won. When Halirrhothius, a son of Poseidon, assaulted Ares’s daughter Alcippe, Ares killed him on the spot. Poseidon demanded justice, and the gods convened on a hill below the Acropolis to judge the case. They acquitted him. The Athenians went on calling that hill the Areopagus, the rock of Ares, and held their own murder trials there for centuries after, which is a strange legacy for the least loved god to leave a city that preferred his sister.

His gifts were simple and real. He could fill a fighter with the courage to stand in a line of spears and the frenzy to keep killing once the line broke. Where he walked, men found the nerve for things they would never do sober. But the gifts came without judgment, and that was the flaw built into him. Raw force with no plan behind it can be outthought, and Ares was outthought constantly: by Athena’s strategy, by the cunning of giants, by a mortal with a goddess steering his arm. He was strong enough to terrify everyone and never quite clever enough to win. The Greeks, who knew exactly what a battlefield smelled like, understood him as the truth war keeps hidden under its banners.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ares in Greek mythology?

Ares is the Greek god of war, one of the Twelve Olympians and the son of Zeus and Hera. He personifies the brutal, frenzied, bloody side of battle rather than its strategy, which made him both feared and widely disliked. He is often shown as an armored warrior with helmet, shield, and spear.

Who were Ares’s parents and children?

Ares was the son of Zeus, king of the gods, and Hera, queen of Olympus. By his lover Aphrodite he fathered Phobos and Deimos, the personifications of Fear and Terror who accompanied him into battle, as well as Harmonia, who later married Cadmus, the founder of Thebes.

Why did the other gods dislike Ares?

The gods disliked Ares because he represented war’s mindless savagery and seemed to love slaughter for its own sake. In Homer’s Iliad, Zeus tells Ares to his face that he is the most hateful of all the Olympians. Even when wounded, Ares earned ridicule rather than sympathy from his divine family.

What is the story of Ares and Aphrodite?

Ares had an affair with Aphrodite, who was married to the smith-god Hephaestus. When Helios the sun god revealed the affair, Hephaestus forged an invisible net of unbreakable chains and trapped the two lovers together in bed, then summoned the other gods to mock them. The public laughter was their punishment.

Why is the Areopagus in Athens named after Ares?

The Areopagus, a hill below the Acropolis, is named after Ares because he was tried there for killing Halirrhothius, a son of Poseidon who had assaulted Ares’s daughter Alcippe. The gods judged the case and acquitted him, and Athenians used the same hill as a murder court for centuries afterward.