Ares: Greek God of War
In the Greek pantheon, Ares is the god of war, or more precisely the god of unbridled, bloody, frenzied battle fury.
He stands in sharp opposition to Athena, who embodies strategically ordered warfare appropriate to the polis. In Homer, Ares is consistently given negative epithets: «mainomenos» (raging), «brotoloigos» (bane of men), «andreïphontes» (slayer of men).
Yet this Homeric disqualification corresponds to only one part of Greek perception; in Sparta, Thebes, and Thrace, Ares was a central and highly esteemed god to whom prominent temples and cults were dedicated.
It was Athenian polis theology that reduced his profile to its destructive side. His epithet «Enyalios», closely connected with the war goddess Enyo, preserves an older layer of an undivided battle deity.
Ares is a Greek god and embodies the untamed, bloody side of war.
Table of Contents
Myth and Genealogy
In the «Theogony» (lines 921 to 923), Hesiod names Ares as the son of Zeus and Hera, connected as a sibling with Hebe and Eileithyia. Ares thus belongs to the first generation of legitimately begotten Olympian children, unlike the countless extramarital offspring of Zeus.
Scholars read this genealogical position as an indication of an older, pre-Homeric esteem for the god: had Ares been a mere negative figure, the tradition would not have designated him a legitimate principal son.
Ares’ lover is Aphrodite, with whom he begets the illegitimate children Eros, Anteros, Phobos (Fear), Deimos (Terror), and Harmonia. This union is depicted as an adulterous affair in the famous song of Demodocus in the «Odyssey» (VIII, 266 to 366); older and non-Homeric traditions, by contrast, regard it as a legitimate union.
The wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia, described by Apollodorus (III, 4, 2), becomes the model divine bridal procession for the Theban royal dynasty and makes Ares the ancestor of one of the most important Greek noble houses.
From his unions with mortal women descend the Thracian heroes Diomedes (king of the man-eating horses), Cycnus (slain by Heracles), Tereus (king of Daulis), Phlegyas (father of Coronis and grandfather of Asclepius), Oenomaus (father of Hippodamia), and the Amazon queen Penthesilea, who fights on the Trojan side in the Trojan War.
Ares’ progeny is thus exceptionally violent, which confirms the genealogical function of the god as the ancestor of grim heroes.
Mycenaean Linear B records from Knossos name a god «a-re», whose identification with Ares is probable but not entirely certain. The records point to a recipient of simple offerings, not to a principal god.
The pronounced veneration of Ares in Thrace (Herodotus V, 7) and in Scythia led Walter Burkert to suppose that the later Homeric negative image rests in part on ethnic stigmatization: the «barbarian god» of the Thracians was portrayed as unworthy by the Ionian epic poets.
Symbols, Iconography, and Attributes
Ares is typically depicted as a bearded or beardless warrior with helmet, spear, shield, and sword. He wears full armor; only rarely does he appear without a cuirass.
His chariot is drawn by four horses, whose names are Phobos, Deimos, Aithon, and Phlogeos. He is accompanied by his sons Phobos and Deimos as well as by his sister Enyo. In some depictions the Keres also appear, demonic spirits of violent death.
His sacred animal is the vulture, which, because of its feeding on carrion from battlefields, was regarded as the warrior’s companion bird. The dog (especially the sharp-eyed watchdog) is also associated with him, and in Thrace the wolf.
The woodpecker, which hacks at rocks with its beak, is regarded in the Italic tradition as his bird and establishes the connection to the Roman Mars, whose woodpecker (picus) led the migrating tribes in the choosing of the sacred spring (ver sacrum).
The sculptural representation of Ares in classical Greek art is curiously restrained. There is no great cult colossus comparable to the Zeus of Olympia or the Athena Parthenos.
The most famous ancient Ares statue, the «Ares Borghese» (now in the Louvre), shows the god beardless, youthful, and in contrapposto, without any aggression; the statue is regarded as a Roman copy after a Greek original by Alcamenes or Polyclitus.
The «Ludovisi Ares» (now in the Palazzo Altemps in Rome) shows the god at rest with helmet and shield, in a pose of pensive weariness that strikingly contradicts the Homeric battle fury.
In Sparta there was an archaic wooden statue of Ares Enyalios in fetters; Pausanias (III, 15, 7) explains the image by saying that the Spartans wished in this way to keep the war god in their city forever.
Comparable is the bronze Ares block in the temple of Geronthrae, which was similarly fettered. This fettering iconography shows the ambivalent position of Ares: he must be bound because his power would otherwise destroy even his own city.
Cult and Veneration
The cult of Ares was moderately widespread across the Greek mainland, but in some regions it ranked high. In Sparta the soldiers had to offer a dog sacrifice to Ares Enyalios before each battle, a rite very unusual in antiquity (Pausanias III, 14, 9).
The dog sacrifice was regarded as chthonic and suited the dark profile of the god. Young Spartans who reached the obligatory age dedicated a young cock to him before entering the citizen army.
In Athens lay the Areopagus, the «hill of Ares», northwest of the Acropolis; according to Attic tradition, Ares had here given account before the Olympians because he had killed Halirrhothius, a son of Poseidon, who had attempted to rape his daughter Alcippe (Apollodorus III, 14, 2).
The court on the Areopagus, which until the fifth century before our era constituted the highest aristocratic courts of Athens, derived its name and its cosmic legitimacy from this episode.
In Thebes, Ares was the ancestor of the royal dynasty through Cadmus and Harmonia. His sacred grove with the dragon consecrated to him, which Cadmus slew, belongs to the oldest foundation myths of the city.
In Tegea, Ares was venerated as Gynaikothoinas («feasting with women»), because the women of the city had once driven back the Lacedaemonians in a battle and alone enjoyed the sacrificial meal (Pausanias VIII, 48, 4 to 5). This unusual women’s cult version is striking from the perspective of religious history.
In Halicarnassus, a Carian city, Ares was the principal god of the community together with Bellona and Enyo. In Thrace, present-day Bulgaria and European Turkey, Ares was, according to Herodotus (V, 7), the supreme god of the local population; a reportedly enormous iron pillar marked his central sanctuary.
According to Herodotus (IV, 62), the Scythians are said to have venerated Ares in the form of an old iron sword set up on a high earthen mound and offered horse sacrifices to it with blood.
These cults show that Ares held a far more central position on the northern and eastern margins of the Greek world than in the classical core.
Important Sanctuaries and Temples
The most important Athenian temple of Ares stood, in classical times, not in Athens itself but was only transferred from Acharnae to the Agora in Roman times.
The Acharnae temple was a Doric structure of the fifth century; Augustus or a successor had it brought stone by stone to the Agora and rebuilt there as a counterpart to the Hephaisteion. The foundations of this temple can today be archaeologically identified in the northern Agora.
In Geronthrae on the Eurotas in Laconia stood a sanctuary of Ares with an annual festival in which no women were permitted to take part (Pausanias III, 22, 6 to 7).
In Troezen near the Hellios hill there was a temple of Ares Gynaikoboas («woman-breaking»), in Sparta one of Ares Theritas. In Tegea the temple of Ares Gynaikothoinas was connected with the women’s festival.
In Halicarnassus the main sanctuary lay on the acropolis, next to the Mausoleum of Mausolus. In Sigeion in the Troad and in Olynthus there were temples of Ares which, because of their importance in the Athenian hegemonic war of 358 to 348 before our era, became political flashpoints.
In Hellenistic Pergamon, Eumenes II dedicated a precinct to the god within the framework of the Asclepieion. The Thracian cult center described by Herodotus has not been unambiguously located archaeologically; it presumably lay in the region of the present-day Bulgarian Black Sea coast.
Mythological Narratives
In the Trojan War, Ares stands variably on both sides, but is always defeated by Athena.
In Homer (Iliad V, 859 to 906) he is wounded by Diomedes, guided by Athena; Ares lets out a cry of pain that sounds like the din of nine or ten thousand men, and flees to Olympus, where he complains to Zeus about the injustice.
Zeus rebuffs him harshly: «To me you are the most hateful of all the gods who dwell on Olympus» (V, 890). This pronouncement of the father of the gods against his own son is regarded as the locus classicus for Ares’ negative image in the Homeric epic.
The «Theomachy» of Iliad XX and XXI again sees Ares confronting Athena; here too he is defeated. Finally he intervenes in the fighting disguised as a mortal Trojan, but is once more driven back.
In the later tradition, Ares’ daughter Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, falls in love with Achilles, who kills her and at the sight of her himself feels grief; this motif shapes the Kestner vase and the «Aethiopis» material.
The myth of Ares and Aphrodite, caught in Hephaestus’ net, is the best-known story of the god. In the Homeric narrative (Odyssey VIII) it leads to his ridicule before the Olympians.
In the later tradition, however, the episode is given a more positive turn: from the union proceed the gods Eros and Harmonia, and some philosophers, among them Plutarch, see in the union the harmony of war and love as a cosmic principle that brings forth all opposites.
The episode with the Aloadae, the giants Otus and Ephialtes, is recounted by Apollodorus (I, 7, 4): the two sons of Poseidon and Iphimedeia bind Ares in a bronze jar and hold him captive for thirteen months.
Only Hermes, informed by the stepmother Eriboea, frees the god, half dead from exhaustion. This story shows Ares as vulnerable to cunning, which compensates for his profile of pure force.
Relationships within the Pantheon
Ares’ relationship to Zeus and Hera is ambivalent. In Homer, Zeus declares him his most hated son, yet Hera repeatedly takes his side, for instance when Diomedes wounds him.
With Athena there is a fundamental enmity arising from the basic difference of their conceptions of war: Athena plans and protects the polis, Ares storms and destroys. In two Homeric episodes she defeats him directly: in the Diomedes episode and in the Theomachy.
With Aphrodite, Ares shares one of the central love stories of Greek myth. The later philosophical tradition interprets the union as a cosmic reconciliation of the opposites of war and love; from it Harmonia proceeds.
With Hephaestus, the lawful husband of Aphrodite, there is open rivalry, culminating in the aforementioned net incident. Eros, their common child, is in the Orphic tradition the oldest and most powerful god; in the Olympian tradition he is reduced to a childhood attendant of Aphrodite.
With the «warlike» siblings Enyo (sister) and with Ker and Eris (battlefield companions), Ares forms a circle of grim gods who function as personifications of the events of battle.
The question of whether Enyo is a goddess in her own right or only an aspect of Ares Enyalios is discussed in modern scholarship; the oldest evidence suggests an independent goddess who was integrated into Ares’ retinue in the Olympian period.
With Hermes, the brother who frees him from the bronze jar, there is a rare positive relationship.
Reception
The Roman identification with Mars yields a fundamentally different conception. In Italy, Mars was a principal god of venerable profile, protector of the tribe, bestower of agricultural fertility, and ancestor of Rome through Romulus and Remus.
Unlike the unwelcome Greek Ares, Mars was equal in rank to Jupiter in the Capitoline triad of the early Republic (Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus). Roman religion thus lost the negative component of Ares almost entirely and assigned it to Bellona or to personified Furor.
In the Middle Ages, Ares-Mars became a planetary figure and the ruler of the day «martedì» (Tuesday, day of Mars). Boccaccio treats him in «De genealogia deorum gentilium» as an allegorical figure of wrath.
Chaucer’s «Knight’s Tale» makes him the patron of the knight Arcite. The Renaissance brings Botticelli’s «Venus and Mars» (1483 to 1485, National Gallery London), which shows the god asleep, soothed by Aphrodite, an allegory of the reconciliation of war and love.
Velázquez’ «Mars» (1640, Prado) and Rubens’ «Consequences of War» (1638) interpret the god as a pensive, almost melancholy figure. In the nineteenth century, Ares recedes behind the personification of the modern war machine.
Modern popular culture has taken him up as the archetypal warrior antagonist in games, films, and comics, often without regard for the historically ambivalent position of the god. Since Burkert, scholarship has systematically worked out the independence and partial high standing of the Ares cult outside the Athenian discourse.
Classification in Religious Studies
The etymology of the name Ares is contested. An Indo-European derivation from the root «*h₂er-» (to spoil, to harm) is possible, but not secured; the Mycenaean Linear B records («a-re») attest the name already in the second millennium before our era in the Aegean.
Robert Beekes rejects an Indo-European etymology and argues for a pre-Greek origin. The Thracian focus of veneration suggests a northern, possibly non-Indo-European background.
In a comparative religious context, parallels stand out to the Vedic Indra, who is likewise a battle god and leader of the Devas, as well as to the Norse Týr and (in a different layer) to the Celtic Camulus or Cocidius.
Georges Dumézil assigned Ares to the second, warlike function of his Indo-European tripartite theory. Yet the independence of Ares within the Greek pantheon alongside the second, likewise warlike Athena makes a purely Dumézilian classification difficult.
In «Greek Religion», Walter Burkert worked out the function of Ares as the «other» war god, who makes religiously addressable the negative in war that can be tamed by no polis-related strategy.
He sees the ritual fettering in Sparta and Geronthrae as an expression of an apotropaic religiosity: the god is fettered so that he spares his own community.
More recent works, for instance by Pierre Bonnechere on the Thracian aspects and by Jan Bremmer on the initiation rites, have further differentiated the profile of Ares as a complex, regionally varied god.
Etymology and Linear B Records
The name «Ares» (in archaic spelling «Ara») has been attested since the second millennium before our era. Mycenaean Linear B tablets from Knossos (tablet V 52) name a theonym «a-re», whose identification with Ares is probable but not established with certainty.
The records point to a recipient of modest offerings, not to a principal god. This early position at the periphery of the Mycenaean pantheon may be an indication that Ares held no central function in Bronze Age religion and rose to a principal Olympian figure only in the archaic period.
Several derivations have been proposed etymologically. A connection with the Indo-European root «*h₂er-» (to spoil, to harm) is possible, but semantically yields a profile that corresponds more to the Erinyes or Ker than to the classical Ares.
Robert Beekes rejects an Indo-European etymology and argues for a pre-Greek origin. The Thracian focus of veneration suggests a northern, possibly non-Indo-European background, yet the precise ethnolinguistic origin of the name remains open.
A particular theological connection is merited by the epithet «Enyalios», under which Ares was venerated especially in the archaic period. Enyalios appears in Linear B tablets («e-nu-wa-ri-jo») already independently alongside «a-re», which led earlier scholarship to the thesis that Enyalios was originally an independent war deity that merged with Ares in the archaic period.
The sister Enyo, who belongs to the battle deity of the Iliad, would accordingly be the female counterpart of the same older layer. Walter Burkert advanced this hypothesis cautiously in «Greek Religion»; it is today one of the discussed options regarding the prehistory of the Ares cult.
Sources
Homer, «Iliad» V, 825 to 909 (wounding by Diomedes), XX, 51 to 53 and XXI, 391 to 414 (Theomachy); «Odyssey» VIII, 266 to 366 (Aphrodite). Hesiod, «Theogony» 921 to 923. Apollodorus, «Bibliotheke», I, 7, 4 (Aloadae), III, 4, 2 (Harmonia), III, 14, 2 (Areopagus). Herodotus, «Histories» IV, 62 (Scythian sword cult), V, 7 (Thrace).
Pausanias, «Description of Greece», III, 14, 9 (dog sacrifice in Sparta), III, 15, 7 (fettered image), VIII, 48, 4 to 5 (Tegea).
Walter Burkert, «Greek Religion of the Archaic and Classical Period», Stuttgart 1977. Karl Kerényi, «The Mythology of the Greeks», Zurich 1951. Jan N. Bremmer, «Greek Religion and Culture», Leiden 2008. Georges Dumézil, «L’idéologie tripartite des Indo-Européens», Brussels 1958.
