Ares

A war god driven from battle

During the Trojan War, the Greek hero Diomedes charged at Ares outside the city of Troy. The goddess Athena steadied the mortal’s spear and turned Ares’s own weapon aside. She drove the bronze point into the god’s belly. Ares roared as loud as thousands of soldiers and rose from the battlefield like a dark cloud.

On Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, he showed Zeus the immortal blood flowing from his wound. He blamed Athena. Zeus answered with contempt. He called Ares the most hateful god on Olympus, because quarrels, war and fighting always delighted him.

Zeus’s rebuke sets Ares apart from Athena, though both of them go into battle. Athena uses strategy and chooses sides. Ares is the rage and noise of battle, a force his own father cannot bear.

Condemned and then healed

Zeus still had his son healed. Any other god’s child as destructive as Ares, he said, would long ago have been thrown out. But Ares was his son by Hera.

Paeon, the healer of the gods, closed the wound. Ares’s sister Hebe washed him, and Ares sat down again beside Zeus.

The episode holds condemnation and protection together. The gods on Olympus reject what Ares stands for. They still make room for him, because war belongs within the family of the gods.

A father’s revenge on trial

Apollodorus, whose Library retells the Greek myths, gives Ares a very different reason to kill. Halirrhothius, a son of Poseidon and Euryte, attacked Alcippe, the daughter of Ares and Agraulus. Ares killed him, and Poseidon took him to court for the death.

Twelve gods heard the case and cleared Ares. The hill where the trial took place is said to have taken its name from it: the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares. The site was known for murder trials.

Here Ares is no reckless fighter complaining after a defeat. He is a father, and his violence is judged as an answer to violence against his daughter. The story ends in a lawful verdict instead of another act of revenge.

The myth leaves bloodshed in Ares’s nature. It puts one killing before a court and finds that the circumstances matter. The force Zeus despises in the Iliad can also be used to protect someone, and then be submitted to judgement.

Worship without affection

The Greeks did worship Ares, but the ancient evidence shows his worship as less widespread than that of gods such as Athena or Apollo. He had sanctuaries, sacred places set aside for him, and other honours at Athens, in the region of Laconia, and at Tegea, Olympia, Thebes and Sparta. At Therapne in Laconia people worshipped him as Thareitas, a title attached to an old statue of the god.

This pattern fits the poems, yet it does not prove that every Greek hated him. Cities that depended on armed force could honour the god of battle and still fear conflict out of control. Zeus’s anger in the Iliad shows a distinction the Greeks kept: a community could accept that war was sometimes necessary and still refuse to admire it.

How an Athenian temple changed gods

A temple in Athens gives Ares an unusual later history. The Temple of Ares stood in the Agora, the public square of ancient Athens. Its foundations date from the early Roman period. The marble building above them was made in the fifth century BC. Numbers that the stonemasons left on the blocks show that the temple was taken apart and put back together.

The older temple had stood at Pallene and was dedicated to Athena Pallenis, Athena of Pallene. In the early first century AD it was taken down, carried to the Agora and rebuilt on new foundations for Ares. So the building linked with Athens’ war god began under the name of the goddess who had helped wound him at Troy.

That history is not a myth, and it should not be read as one. It still leaves Ares in a fittingly mixed place in Athens. His story there gathers around an acquittal, a hill of judgement and a temple taken over from Athena. Even where the city gave battle a home, it framed that force through law, reuse and the presence of his more disciplined rival.