Wounded in the belly by a mortal and fled to Olympus bellowing like ten thousand men
Diomedes struck him with Athena's help in Iliad 5; Zeus called him the most hateful of gods.
Myth · Greek
Ares
Greek mythology — Olympian, god of war
Ares is the god of war in its raw and bloody aspect — the battle-lust and slaughter that Athena's strategic warfare is set against. The Greeks gave him little cult and less affection: Zeus in the Iliad calls him the most hateful of the gods, and he is repeatedly beaten, wounded and humiliated in myth. His Roman counterpart Mars is a far grander figure, second only to Jupiter, father of Romulus and Remus and a god of agriculture as well as war.
How to spot them
- ▸Spear, helmet, shield and chariot; the vulture and the dog
- ▸Attended by Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Terror, and by Eris, Strife
- ▸Lover of Aphrodite; the least loved of the Olympians
- ▸The Athenian hill and law court named after him
Stories & episodes
Caught in a net of unbreakable chains with another god's wife, to the laughter of Olympus
Hephaestus displayed the pair; Demodocus sings the story in Odyssey 8.
Stuffed into a bronze jar for thirteen months by two giant brothers
Otus and Ephialtes, the Aloadae; Hermes got him out, half-dead.
Tried by the gods for murder on an Athenian hill, and acquitted
He had killed Halirrhothius, a son of Poseidon, for assaulting his daughter; the hill became the Areopagus.
His serpent guarded a spring at Thebes until Cadmus killed it
Cadmus served him eight years in penance, then married his daughter Harmonia.
His golden fleece hung in a grove in Colchis, guarded by a sleepless dragon
The object of the voyage of the Argonauts.
Fear and Terror harness his chariot; Strife is his sister and companion
Phobos and Deimos, who now name the two moons of Mars.
Quick-fire facts
- •Roman equivalent: Mars, father of Romulus and Remus and second in importance only to Jupiter in Roman religion
- •Son of Zeus and Hera; in Ovid's Fasti, Juno conceives Mars alone, by touching a flower
- •By Aphrodite he fathered Phobos, Deimos and Harmonia; by the mortal Otrera, the Amazons
- •His cult in Greece was thin; Thrace was thought of as his homeland
- •The Areopagus, 'hill of Ares', gave its name to the Athenian court that tried homicide, and to the place where St Paul preached in Acts 17
- •Mars gave his name to March (Martius), the month war resumed, and to Tuesday in the Romance languages (French mardi)
- •The Campus Martius at Rome, the Salii priests and the festival of the October Horse belonged to Mars
- •The planet Mars — the red planet — carries his Roman name, and its moons Phobos and Deimos his sons' names
- •'Martial' and 'martial arts' derive from Mars
- •In Aeschylus and Homer he is called Enyalios, and Enyo is the war-goddess who accompanies him
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Sources
- Aaron J. Atsma, the Theoi Project — Ares
- Homer — Iliad Book 5, his wounding by Diomedes and Zeus's rebuke