Ares阿瑞斯

Origins

Son of Zeus and Hera. Athena is also a god of war, but she stands for strategy and the just fight; Ares is the blood and fury of the battlefield itself. The Greeks feared him and did not much like him.

Sacred symbols

Sword and spearHelmetVultureHounds

Myths

Prisoner in a bronze jar

The giant brothers Otus and Ephialtes bound him and shut him in a bronze jar for thirteen months. He would have died there had Hermes not heard of it and stolen him out.

Wounded by a mortal

At Troy the hero Diomedes, with Athena guiding the spear, stabbed him in the belly. He screamed like ten thousand men and fled to Olympus to complain to his father.

The Hill of Ares

He killed a son of Poseidon who had assaulted his daughter, was tried by the gods on a hill in Athens, and was acquitted. The hill has been the Areopagus ever since, and became the Athenian court for homicide.

Relationships with the other gods

• FeudZeus

  The son he liked least

  When Ares ran home wounded from Troy to complain, Zeus let him have it: "Of all the gods on Olympus you are the most hateful to me — you care for nothing but strife, war and battle." Then he had him healed anyway, because he was still his son.

• KinHera

  Mother and war-god

  Ares was her legitimate son by Zeus. But in the Trojan War she backed the Greeks and he fought for Troy. So she asked Zeus: "Will you be angry if I have Ares beaten off the field?" — and sent Athena to do it.

• RivalryAthena

  The two faces of war

  One is strategy and discipline, the other brute force and bloodlust — and in Homer the first always wins. Athena helps Diomedes wound Ares, then later fells him herself with a boundary stone and laughs: "Have you still not learned how much stronger I am?"

• DesireAphrodite

  Lovers in the golden net

  Love and War were the most famous lovers on Olympus, meeting whenever Hephaestus was away. Their children were Phobos (Fear), Deimos (Dread) and Harmonia (Harmony) — what comes of love joined to war is terror, and also concord.

• FeudHephaestus

  Brothers and rivals

  Both sons of Hera — one tall and warlike, one lame and ugly. On the day of the golden net the gods roared with laughter: "The slow has caught the swift; the cripple has caught the fastest god of all." Hephaestus would not open the net until Poseidon stood surety for the fine.

• FeudPoseidon

  The first murder trial

  A son of Poseidon assaulted Ares's daughter, and Ares killed him on the spot. Poseidon took the war-god to court; the twelve gods sat in judgement on a hill in Athens and acquitted him. The hill has been called the Areopagus ever since.

• AllianceHermes

  Rescue from the bronze jar

  Ares lay in the giants' bronze jar for thirteen months and was nearly dead when their stepmother let the secret slip. Hermes, with a thief's skill, slipped in and stole him out — the god best at fighting, saved by the god best at stealing.