Ares

• 1. Introduction

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  Ares, the Greek god of war, was one of the most feared and least loved of the Twelve Olympians. Son of Zeus and Hera, he embodied something that made even his own divine family deeply uneasy: not the glory of war, but its raw, uncontrolled brutality. The gods called him overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, man-slaughtering. When he returned wounded from the battlefields of Troy, Zeus himself recoiled, telling Ares he was the most hateful of all the gods on Olympus. What does it mean that a civilization worshipped a deity they openly despised? Why did cities chain his statues in iron fetters? And how did a god so relentlessly humiliated in myth end up with over seventy coin issues in Asia Minor alone? The answers stretch from the windswept plains of Thrace to the kingdoms of ancient Africa, and from the Linear B tablets of Mycenae to the triumphal inscriptions of Aksum.

• 2. A Name From The Deep Past

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  The earliest recorded form of the name Ares appears not in classical Greek but in the Linear B syllabic script of Mycenaean Greece, written as a-re. This pushes his origins back well beyond the Iliad and the Odyssey, into the Bronze Age world that preceded classical Greek civilization by centuries. The scholar Walter Burkert traced the name to an ancient abstract noun meaning "throng of battle, war," while the traditional etymology connects it to the Ionic Greek word arē, meaning bane, ruin, curse, or imprecation. R. S. P. Beekes has argued for a Pre-Greek origin of the name altogether, suggesting the god may have arrived with populations that preceded the Greeks themselves. His epithets in ancient texts reinforce the sense of something older and wilder than Olympian refinement: atos polemoio, insatiate at war; brotoloigos, plague of man; miaifonos, blood-stained; tykton kakon, complete evil. The epithet Enyalios, also applied to Ares in the Classical period, appears on a Mycenaean tablet designated KN V 52. Even in the same town, ancient Greeks sometimes treated Enyalios as a separate war deity entirely; Burkert described the two as "doubles almost." In the Iliad, the word ares appears as a common noun synonymous with battle itself, suggesting the deity and the concept were once practically indistinguishable.

• 3. The God Greeks Could Not Love

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  Greek literature treated Ares with a consistent pattern of contempt masked as caution. In Homer's Iliad, Zeus calls him the most hateful of all gods on Olympus, and this ambivalence ripples through the culture. Where his sister Athena represented intelligence, strategy, and the kind of war that produces lasting order, Ares represented the part of combat that no civilization can fully celebrate: the killing urge stripped of purpose. The Greeks associated this savagery explicitly with the Thracians, a people they regarded as barbarous and warlike. Thrace was considered Ares's birthplace, and after the humiliating exposure of his affair with Aphrodite, it was to Thrace that he retreated. A late sixth-century BC funerary inscription from Attica spells out the consequences of falling under Ares's influence, treating it as a kind of doom rather than a blessing. His nearest Roman counterpart, Mars, was given a radically different character: a father of the Roman people, a guardian of the state, a bringer of peace through war. The contrast between the two figures reveals how much a society's self-image shapes the gods it assigns to the same domain. Ares embodies what the Greeks feared about themselves; Mars reflects what Rome wished to believe about itself.

• 4. Chained and Put On Trial

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  Pausanias, writing in the second century AD, describes an archaic Spartan statue of Ares in chains, kept in the temple of Enyalios. The Spartans believed that keeping the spirit of war bound meant keeping it present, unable to flee the city when they needed it most. This logic extended across the Greek world in unexpected ways. An oracle of the late Hellenistic era instructed several cities of Pamphylia, in Anatolia, including Syedra, Lycia, and Cilicia, to erect statues of what it called "bloody, man-slaying Ares" and to hold an annual festival in which the statue was bound with iron fetters "by Dike and Hermes," put on trial as if seeking justice, and offered sacrifice. The oracle's promise was direct: "thus will he become a peaceful deity for you, once he has driven the enemy horde far from your country, and he will give rise to prosperity much prayed for." These regions were almost perpetually under threat from pirates, and the ritual transformed the god of violent war into a civic protector. The resulting form of Ares, known as Ares karpodotes, meaning giver of fruits, is well attested in Lycia and Pisidia. The Spartans similarly bound statues of Aphrodite and Artemis, suggesting that chaining divine images was a broader cultic technology, a way of controlling power by performing its subjugation.

• 5. War God at the Edge of the World

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  Beyond the borders of Greece, Ares acquired faces that the Greeks back home would barely have recognized. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, identifies a Thracian deity as Ares through the Greek practice of mapping foreign gods onto familiar names. In his Histories, the Scythians worshipped an indigenous form of Ares who ranked beneath three other deities in their divine hierarchy. His cult object was an iron sword. The Scythian god received blood sacrifices of cattle, horses, and one in every hundred human war-captives, whose blood was used to douse the sword. His worshippers built complex platform-altars of heaped brushwood and erected statues in his honor. Some scholars have proposed that this sword-cult persisted among the Alans, and that the legendary "Sword of Mars" in later European tradition may trace back to the Huns having adopted this same Ares worship. In Africa, Maḥrem, the principal god of the kings of Aksum prior to the fourth century AD, was invoked as Ares in Greek inscriptions. The anonymous king who commissioned the Monumentum Adulitanum in the late second or early third century described Ares as "my greatest god" who had "begat" him and through whom he had brought various peoples under his sway. Ezana, the last pagan king of Aksum, referred to "the one who brought me forth, the invincible Ares" in the early fourth century.

• 6. Myth, Humiliation, and Desire

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  In Homer's Odyssey, the bard performing in the hall of Alcinous tells how the sun-god Helios once spied Ares and Aphrodite together in the hall of Hephaestus and reported the encounter to her husband. Hephaestus responded by fashioning a finely-knitted, nearly invisible net. He sprung it at the right moment, trapping the couple in each other's embrace. Then, unsatisfied with private revenge, he summoned the Olympian gods to witness the spectacle. The goddesses declined out of modesty, but the male gods came and mocked the pair. Some remarked that they would eagerly trade places with Ares, even in chains. Once freed, the humiliated Ares fled to Thrace, and Hephaestus subsequently divorced Aphrodite, who then married Ares. A later elaboration added the figure of Alectryon, a young soldier Ares had posted as a lookout while he met with Aphrodite. Alectryon fell asleep, Helios discovered the lovers, and a furious Ares transformed him into a rooster, which henceforth always announces the sun's arrival as a form of apology. In the founding myth of Thebes, Ares is the progenitor of a water-dragon slain by Cadmus. Cadmus served Ares for eight years as atonement, then married Harmonia, a daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, as further propitiation. Through Harmonia, strife was reconciled and Thebes was founded; Plutarch records that the plain of Thebes was once described as "the dancing-floor of Ares."

• 7. Mars, Mirror and Transformation

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  Mars, the Roman counterpart to Ares, began as an agricultural deity before becoming the pre-eminent war god of the Roman army. As the father of Romulus, Rome's legendary founder, Mars was granted a dignity that Ares never enjoyed in Greek culture. In one tradition he fathered Romulus and Remus through Rhea Silvia; in another, his lover Venus gave birth to Aeneas, the Trojan prince whose descendants eventually founded Rome. When Greek literary culture spread through the Roman world, Roman writers reinterpreted Ares's myths under the name of Mars, and Greek writers in turn recorded Roman cult practices using the name Ares. By the time of the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods, the two figures had become virtually indistinguishable in Western art and literature. In those later artistic traditions, Ares's symbols are a spear and helmet, his animal a dog, and his bird a vulture. Yet the Renaissance image of Mars as a romantic emblem of manly valor had traveled far from the Greek original: the cruel, bloodthirsty deity whom Zeus publicly reviled had been softened into an icon of dignified masculine strength. The Athenian agora's Temple of Ares was itself relocated and rededicated in 2 AD during the reign of Augustus, effectively repurposed as a Roman temple to Mars Ultor, the Augustan Mars of vengeance, completing the god's long transformation from a figure of fear into one of civic power.