Ares- Greek GodDeity"Curse of Men"

The Unloved God

In the Iliad, Zeus tells his son to his face: "You are the most hateful to me of all the gods who hold Olympus. Forever quarreling is dear to your heart, wars and battles." No father on Olympus spoke to a child that way. Ares was a full Olympian, son of Zeus and Hera, yet none of his siblings treated him with respect.

The twin giants Otus and Ephialtes, sons of Poseidon, grew nine fathoms tall before they were done growing. They stuffed Ares into a bronze jar and sealed it shut. He remained trapped for thirteen lunar months, slowly weakening, his war cries muffled in the dark. Their stepmother Eriboea finally told Hermes, who pried the jar open and pulled out a war god half-dead with exhaustion. Two adolescent giants had undone the lord of battle.

The Thracian War God

Homer calls Ares "Thracian" like an epithet. Thrace was where his worship ran deepest.

He never rode to war alone. His sons Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Terror, drove his chariot, and where it passed, men broke ranks and fled. His sister Eris walked ahead to kindle the quarrel, and Enyo followed behind to see that nothing was left standing. In the Shield of Heracles, Ares screams his war cry over a battlefield already littered with the dying, before the mortal armies have even met.

In Sparta, his statue stood bound in chains. Not as punishment, but to keep his spirit of victory from ever leaving the city.

Ares at Troy

Ares fought for Troy. He waded into the fighting and slaughtered Greeks without distinction, rallying the Trojans with his war cry. Then Athena guided the mortal Diomedes's spear into his side. The wound made Ares bellow with the force of nine or ten thousand warriors. He fled to Olympus to complain to Zeus.

Zeus showed no sympathy. He ordered Paieon to heal the wound, since Ares was his son, but nothing more. Later, when Zeus let the gods fight openly, Ares charged straight at Athena. She sidestepped his spear and struck him with a boulder. His body sprawled across seven acres of the plain. Aphrodite rushed to drag the dazed war god from the field, and Athena knocked her down too. Twice in the same war, Ares met his sister in combat. Twice he was carried from the field.

The Affair with Aphrodite

How the war god and the love goddess ended up in bed together, no one on Olympus could quite explain. But Helios, the all-seeing sun, witnessed their tryst and told the one person who should not have known: Hephaestus, Aphrodite's husband. The bard Demodocus tells the tale in the Odyssey.

Hephaestus forged an unbreakable golden net, finer than spider silk but strong as adamantine, and hung it above Aphrodite's bed. When the lovers next met, the trap sprung. Hephaestus called the gods to witness his wife and her lover caught naked and unable to move. The gods laughed. Hermes quipped that he would happily trade places with Ares, nets and all. Poseidon persuaded Hephaestus to release them, guaranteeing that Ares would pay the adultery fine. Ares fled to Thrace in shame. Aphrodite retreated to Cyprus.

The Dragon of Thebes

When Cadmus arrived in Boeotia, guided by Apollo's oracle to follow a cow and found his city where it lay down, he sent companions to draw water from a spring sacred to Ares. The spring was guarded by a dragon, a child of Ares, that killed Cadmus's men before he confronted it alone. He drove a spear through its body and pinned it to an oak tree.

On Athena's instruction, Cadmus sowed the dragon's teeth into the plowed earth. From the furrows sprang the Spartoi, fully armed warriors who erupted from the ground already fighting. Only five survived the slaughter. They became the founding noble families of Thebes. Ares demanded payment for his dragon. Cadmus served the war god for eight years before the gods permitted him to take his throne and marry Harmonia.

Children of Ares

Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, married Cadmus and tied the war god's bloodline to the city he had already marked. At their wedding, attended by all the gods, Hephaestus presented the bride with a golden necklace. He was still smarting from Ares and Aphrodite's affair, and the necklace carried a curse. Every generation that inherited it suffered. The line ran through to Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother without knowing either.

Among Ares's mortal sons, Cycnus was a brigand near Pagasae who murdered travelers and piled their skulls into a temple for his father. When Heracles confronted him, Ares descended to protect his son. Athena deflected the war god's spear, and Heracles wounded him in the thigh. Ares retreated to Olympus yet again.

The Trial on the Areopagus

Poseidon's son Halirrhothius raped Ares's daughter Alcippe near the Acropolis. Ares killed him. Poseidon, grieving for his son, demanded justice.

The gods assembled on the rocky hill west of the Acropolis to hear the case. They acquitted him. The hill took the name Areopagus, "Hill of Ares," and became the seat of Athens's oldest homicide court.