Domain: War, violence, bloodlust Symbol: Spear, helmet, dog, vulture Roman Equivalent: Mars
Overview
Ares is the god of war, representing its violent, physical, and chaotic dimensions. Where Athena governs strategy and just conflict, Ares embodies the brutality and bloodlust of the battlefield — slaughter for its own sake. Son of Zeus and Hera, he is among the least loved of the Olympians, feared by mortals and openly scorned by the other gods; Zeus himself tells him in the Iliad that he is the most hateful of all his children.
His sacred animals are the dog and the vulture, creatures drawn to the carnage of war. He is attended by his sons Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Terror) and the goddess Eris (Strife). Despite his ferocity, Ares is curiously easy to defeat in myth: he is wounded by mortals, outmaneuvered by his half-sister Athena, and humiliated by the cleverness of those around him — the poets' verdict that raw violence rarely wins.
Key Myths
The affair with Aphrodite. Ares carried on a famous affair with Aphrodite while she was married to Hephaestus the smith. Warned by the sun-god Helios, Hephaestus forged a net of chains so fine as to be invisible and draped it over the marriage bed. When the lovers lay down together they were caught fast, and Hephaestus summoned the other gods to laugh at the trapped pair — a humiliation Ares never lived down. Their union produced several children, including Harmonia and, in some traditions, the love-god Eros.
Wounded at Troy. In the Iliad Ares fights for the Trojans, but Athena guides the spear of the mortal hero Diomedes into the war-god's belly. Ares bellows like ten thousand men and flees back to Olympus to complain to Zeus, who rebuffs him coldly — the strategist's intelligence besting the brute's strength on the open field.
The trial on the Areopagus. When Ares killed Halirrhothius, a son of Poseidon, for assaulting his daughter, he was tried by the other gods on the hill in Athens that took his name — the Areopagus. Acquitted, the episode became the mythic origin of the first homicide court, a rare moment of Ares standing for justice rather than slaughter.
Related
- Aphrodite - Lover
- Hephaestus - The cuckolded husband who trapped him
- Athena - Strategic war versus brute war
- Zeus - Father
- Hera - Mother
- The Tower - The Mars-ruled Major Arcana card of violent, sudden destruction
- Greek Mythology Index