Ares (War God)
godThe god of the savage violence of battle — feared, hated, and necessary, embodying the bloodlust that the Greeks recognised but did not admire.
The Myth
Ares was the Olympian god of war, but where Athena represented strategy and disciplined combat, Ares embodied raw, murderous violence — the berserker rage, the chaos of the battlefield, the screaming and the slaughter. Homer makes him despicable: Zeus tells him he is the most hateful of all the gods. He fights on the Trojan side but is humiliated repeatedly — Diomedes wounds him with Athena's help, and he flees howling to Olympus. Athena defeats him in divine combat during the Iliad's Theomachy. His affair with Aphrodite, exposed by Hephaestus who trapped the lovers in an unbreakable net, made him a figure of ridicule. Yet Ares was necessary. The Greeks understood that war requires both strategy and savagery, and that refusing to acknowledge the beast in combat is a dangerous delusion. In Sparta, Ares was honoured more than in most Greek states — the Spartans understood what Athens preferred to deny, that victory sometimes requires the red god.
Words We Inherited
English words and phrases that trace back to this myth:
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