Ares (; , Árēs ) is the Greek god of war and courage. He is one of the Twelve Olympians, and the son of Zeus and Hera. Many Greeks were ambivalent towards him. He embodies the physical valor necessary for success in war but can also personify sheer brutality and bloodlust, in contrast to his sister Athena, whose martial functions include military strategy and generalship. An association with Ares endows places, objects, and other deities with a savage, dangerous, or militarized quality.
Although Ares's name shows his origins as Mycenaean, his reputation for savagery was thought by some to reflect his likely origins as a Thracian deity. Some cities in Greece and several in Asia Minor held annual festivals to bind and detain him as their protector. In parts of Asia Minor, he was an oracular deity. Still further away from Greece, the Scythians were said to ritually kill one in a hundred prisoners of war as an offering to their equivalent of Ares. The later belief that ancient Spartans had offered human sacrifice to Ares may owe more to mythical prehistory, misunderstandings, and reputation than to reality.
Although there are many literary allusions to Ares's love affairs and children, he has a limited role in Greek mythology. When he does appear, he is often humiliated. In the Trojan War, Aphrodite, protector of Troy, persuades Ares to take the Trojans' side. The Trojans lose, while Ares's sister Athena helps the Greeks to victory. Most famously, when the craftsman-god Hephaestus discovers his wife Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares, he traps the lovers in a net and exposes them to the ridicule of the other gods.
Ares's nearest counterpart in Roman religion is Mars, who was given a more important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion as ancestral protector of the Roman people and state. During the Hellenization of Latin literature, the myths of Ares were reinterpreted by Roman writers under the name of Mars, and in later Western art and literature, the mythology of the two figures became virtually indistinguishable.
Names The etymology of the name Ares is traditionally connected with the Greek word (arē), the Ionic form of the Doric (ara), "bane, ruin, curse, imprecation".ἀρή, Georg Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary. . Walter Burkert notes that "Ares is apparently an ancient abstract noun meaning throng of battle, war."Burkert, p. 169. R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin of the name.R. S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009, pp. 129–130. The earliest attested form of the name is the Mycenaean Greek , a-re, written in the Linear B syllabic script.
The adjectival epithet, Areios ("warlike") was frequently appended to the names of other gods when they took on a warrior aspect or became involved in warfare: Zeus Areios, Athena Areia, even Aphrodite Areia ("Aphrodite within Ares" or "feminine Ares"), who was warlike, fully armoured and armed, partnered with Athena in Sparta, and represented at Kythira's temple to Aphrodite Urania.Budin, Stephanie L. (2010). "Aphrodite Enoplion", In Smith, Amy C.; Pickup, Sadie (eds.). Brill's Companion to Aphrodite. Brill's Companions in Classical Studies. Boston, MA: Brill Publishers. pp. 79–116. . In the Iliad, the word ares is used as a common noun synonymous with "battle".
In the Classical period, Ares is given the epithet Enyalios, which seems to appear on the Mycenaean KN V 52 tablet as , e-nu-wa-ri-jo. At Google Books. Enyalios was sometimes identified with Ares and sometimes differentiated from him as another war god with separate cult, even in the same town; Burkert describes them as "doubles almost".Burkert, p. 44
Epithets Source:Nilsson Vol I, p. 517–519
aatos or atos polemoio, insatiate at war.Liddel Scott alloprosallos, leaning first to one side, then to the other. andreifontēs, man-slaying. apotimos, dishonoured by Sophocles. brotoloigos, plague of man. enyalios, warlike.Liddel Scott Thēritas, at Sparta. Laconic form of Thersites, audacious.Liddel Scott mainomenos, malignant. miaifonos, blood-stained tykton kakon, complete evil.Liddell Scott
Cult
In mainland Greece and the Peloponnese, only a few places are known to have had a formal temple and cult of Ares.Burkert, p. 170. Pausanias (2nd century AD) notes an altar to Ares at Olympia,Pausanias, 5.15.6. and the moving of a Temple of Ares to the Athenian agora during the reign of Augustus, essentially rededicating it (2 AD) as a Roman temple to the Augustan Mars Ultor. The Areopagus ("mount of Ares"), a natural rock outcrop in Athens, some distance from the Acropolis, was supposedly where Ares was tried and acquitted by the gods for his revenge-killing of Poseidon's son, Halirrhothius, who had raped Ares's daughter Alcippe. Its name was used for the court that met there, mostly to investigate and try potential cases of treason.Berens, E.M.: Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, page 113. Project Gutenberg, 2007.
Numismatist M. Jessop Price states that Ares "typified the traditional Spartan character", but had no important cult in Sparta;Cf. Pausanias, 3.19.7. and he never occurs on Spartan coins.Price, M. Jessop. "Greek Imperial Coins: Some Recent Acquisitions by the British Museum." The Numismatic Chronicle, vol. 11, 1971, p. 131. . Accessed 4 Aug. 2021. Pausanias gives two examples of his cult, both of them conjointly with or "within" a warlike Aphrodite, on the Spartan acropolis.Budin, 2010. "Aphrodite Enoplion", pp. 86-116. Gonzalez observes, in his 2005 survey of Ares's cults in Asia Minor, that cults to Ares on the Greek mainland may have been more common than some sources assert.Gonzales, Matthew, "The Oracle and Cult of Ares in Asia Minor", Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 45, 2005, p. 282; "...Ares was not so neglected by the cities of mainland Greece as many would have us believe" Wars between Greek states were endemic; war and warriors provided Ares's tribute, and fed his insatiable appetite for battle.Millington, Alexander T., War and the Warrior: Functions of Ares in Literature and Cult, University College, London, 2013, pp. 41-44, 230 ff
Ares's attributes are instruments of war: a helmet, shield, and sword or spear. Libanius "makes the apple sacred to Ares", but "offers no further comment", nor connections to any aetiological myth. Apples are one of Aphrodite's sacred or symbolic fruits. Littlewood follows Artemidorus claim that to dream of sour apples presages conflict, and lists Ares alongside Eris and the mythological "Apples of Discord".Libanius, Progymnasmata, Model Exercises in Greek Prose Composition and Rhetoric, Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Craig A. Gibson, 2008, p. 263, particularly note 270: and Littlewood, A. R. "The Symbolism of the Apple in Greek and Roman Literature." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72 (1968): pp. 161-162. https://doi.org/10.2307/311078.
Chained statues Gods were immortal but could be bound and restrained, both in mythic narrative and in cult practice. There was an archaic Spartan statue of Ares in chains in the temple of Enyalios (sometimes regarded as the son of Ares, sometimes as Ares himself), which Pausanias claimed meant that the spirit of war and victory was to be kept in the city. The Spartans are known to have ritually bound the images of other deities, including Aphrodite and Artemis (cf Ares and Aphrodite bound by Hephaestus), and in other places there were chained statues of Artemis and Dionysos.Gonzales, 2005, p. 282Burkert, p. 92.
Statues of Ares in chains are described in the instructions given by an oracle of the late Hellenistic era to various cities of Pamphylia (in Anatolia) including Syedra, Lycia and Cilicia, places almost perpetually under threat from pirates. Each was told to set up a statue of "bloody, man-slaying Ares" and provide it with an annual festival in which it was ritually bound with iron fetters ("by Dike and Hermes") as if a supplicant for justice, put on trial and offered sacrifice. The oracle promises that "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". This Ares karpodotes ("giver of Fruits") is well attested in Lycia and Pisidia.Gonzalez, 2005, p. 282
Sacrifices
Like most Greek deities, Ares was given animal sacrifice; in Sparta, after battle, he was given an ox for a victory by stratagem, or a rooster for victory through onslaught.Hughes, Dennis D., Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece, Routledge, 1991, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003, p. 128, The usual recipient of sacrifice before battle was Athena. Reports of historic human sacrifice to Ares in an obscure rite known as the Hekatomphonia represent a very long-standing error, repeated through several centuries and well into the modern era. The hekatomphonia was an animal sacrifice to Zeus; it could be offered by any warrior who had personally slain one hundred of the enemy.Hughes, "Human Sacrifice", 1991, pp.119-122 & notes 145, 146 for a clear account of the error, and how and why it might have been perpetuatedFaraone, Christopher A. "Binding and Burying the Forces of Evil: The Defensive Use of 'Voodoo Dolls' in Ancient Greece." Classical Antiquity, vol. 10, no. 2, 1991, pp. 165–220. . Accessed 18 Aug. 2021 Pausanias reports that in Sparta, each company of youths sacrificed a puppy to Enyalios before engaging in a hand-to-hand "fight without rules" at the Phoebaeum.Graf, F. "Women, War, and Warlike Divinities." Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik, vol. 55, 1984, p. 252. . Accessed 13 Aug. 2021. The chthonic night-time sacrifice of a dog to Enyalios became assimilated to the cult of Ares. Porphyry claims, without detail, that Apollodorus of Athens (circa second century BC) says the Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares, but this may be a reference to mythic pre-history.Hughes, Dennis D., Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece, Routledge, 1991, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003, p. 128, . Hughes is citing Apollodorus of Athens, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historike, 244 F 125. English translation of Porphyry is in
Thrace and Scythia