Ares

Ares was born to Zeus, the king of the gods, and Hera, the queen of Olympus, though some traditions claim that Hera conceived him alone in retaliation for Zeus's solo birth of Athena. From his first breath, Ares was a figure of discord. While Athena, the goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, represented the disciplined general and the just cause, Ares embodied the frenzy of hand-to-hand combat, the clash of bronze, the screaming of the dying, and the reek of blood. He was not a god of victory or honour; he was a god of killing for its own sake, and the other Olympians despised him for it. Hera called him the most hateful of her children, and Zeus openly told him that he found him intolerable, a god who delighted in strife and bloodshed while the other gods lived in peace on Olympus.

Ares's most famous myth is his affair with Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. Aphrodite had been given in marriage to Hephaestus, the divine smith, a skilled craftsman but lame and unattractive. She had no love for her husband, and her heart turned to Ares, who was handsome, violent, and everything Hephaestus was not. Their affair was conducted in secret in the palace Hephaestus had built for her on Olympus. But Helios, the sun-god who sees all that happens beneath his light, discovered them entwined together and told Hephaestus. The smith, rather than confront them directly, used his cunning. He forged a net of bronze so fine that it was invisible to the eye, yet so strong that even a god could not break it, and laid it across the bed. Then he pretended to leave for his beloved island of Lemnos. Ares came as soon as Hephaestus was gone, and the two lovers lay down together, only to find themselves trapped in the mesh, unable to move and utterly exposed. Hephaestus returned, called all the gods to witness the humiliation, and demanded that Zeus return the bride-price he had paid for his unfaithful wife. The gods laughed at the sight, but Poseidon, the god of the sea, intervened and promised to stand surety for Ares's debt. Hephaestus released them, and the lovers fled: Ares to Thrace, and Aphrodite to her sanctuary at Paphos in Cyprus. The affair continued despite the exposure, and from their union came several children, including Harmonia, who would later marry the Theban prince Cadmus.

Ares played a significant role in the Trojan War, though not a glorious one. He sided with the Trojans, swayed by Aphrodite, who favoured Paris and the Trojan cause. During the fighting, he strode across the battlefield in bronze armour, inspiring the Trojans with his presence and striking terror into the Greeks. But the Greek hero Diomedes, aided by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare who hated Ares for his chaotic brutality, confronted the god directly. Athena gave Diomedes the courage to face the immortal and even guided his spear. Diomedes thrust his bronze spear into Ares's belly, and the god of war cried out with a sound like the bellowing of ten thousand warriors, a noise so terrible that both armies froze in terror. Ares fled to Olympus, where Zeus rebuked him for allowing a mortal to wound him, and the healer-god Paeon had to treat his wound with medicines that soothed the pain of an immortal. It was a profound humiliation: the god of war himself had been driven from the field by a mortal man, proving that raw violence was no match for courage guided by wisdom.

Ares suffered other humiliations in myth. The Aloadae, the giant twin brothers Otus and Ephialtes, sons of Poseidon and the mortal Iphimedia, once captured Ares and imprisoned him in a bronze jar for thirteen months. The twins were enormous and arrogant, and they had resolved to storm Olympus and seize the goddesses Hera and Artemis as their wives. They managed to trap Ares, and he would have remained imprisoned forever had not the stepmother of the twins, Eriboea, told the messenger-god Hermes, who rescued the god of war from his humiliating confinement. In another tale, the hero Heracles, the greatest of Greek heroes who was forced to complete twelve impossible labours, defeated Ares in single combat. Heracles was fighting on behalf of the god Apollo, whose sacred tripod had been stolen, and Ares had sided with the thief. Heracles wounded Ares with his spear and drove him from the field, another defeat that underscored the god's limitations.

Ares's worship was centred in Thrace, the wild northern region beyond the Greek heartland, where the people were renowned for their ferocity and love of war. The Thracians were considered barbarians by the Greeks, and the association of Ares with them reinforced his status as an outsider among the Olympians. He also had a significant cult at Thebes, where his daughter Harmonia had married Cadmus, the founder of the city. The Spartans, the most militaristic of the Greek states, also honoured Ares, though even they preferred Athena as their patron goddess of war. In art, Ares was depicted as a handsome but fierce warrior, armed with spear and helmet, accompanied by his sons Phobos and Deimos, the spirits of panic and terror, and by Eris, the goddess of strife, and Enyo, the goddess of war. His sacred animals were the vulture and the dog, both creatures of the battlefield, and his temples were often located outside city walls, as if war itself were too dangerous to bring inside the community.