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Ancient Greek myth generally reserved genuine, unqualified disdain for very few of its own gods. Ares is one of the clearest exceptions, a god whose own father openly calls him the most hateful of all his children in Homer’s Iliad. Understanding why requires seeing what Ares actually represents: not war as strategy or noble sacrifice, but the raw, indiscriminate violence and bloodlust that war produces, stripped of any higher purpose.
Son of Zeus and Hera
Ares is the son of Zeus and Hera, making him, unlike several other major Olympians, born of two full Olympian parents rather than a Titan or mortal union. That legitimate, high-status birth makes his consistently poor reputation among the other gods more striking rather than less; Ares isn’t an outsider or a later addition to Olympus struggling for acceptance, he holds a secure place in the pantheon and is still widely disliked within it.
Homer’s Iliad captures this directly. When Ares, wounded during the fighting at Troy, complains to Zeus about the pain, Zeus responds with open contempt, telling his son that he is the most hateful god on Olympus, that Zeus would have long since cast him down to the depths below the Titans if not for their family connection, and that Ares takes pleasure in nothing but strife and battle. That’s an unusually harsh assessment for a father to level at his own child within the text itself, and it sets the tone for how Ares functions throughout most of Greek literature: present, powerful, and largely unloved.
War as Chaos, Not Strategy
Ares’s defining contrast within Greek mythology is with Athena, who also governs an aspect of war but represents something categorically different: disciplined strategy, defensive skill, and calculated force applied with purpose. Ares represents war’s opposite register entirely, chaotic bloodlust, violence without direction or higher justification, battle-fury for its own sake rather than in service of any larger goal. Ancient sources consistently favor Athena’s version of martial virtue whenever the two gods directly interact or oppose one another, and Athena typically bests Ares in these confrontations, a recurring detail that reflects how thoroughly Greek culture privileged calculated strategic thinking over raw, undirected force.
That distinction mattered enormously to how actual Greek city-states thought about warfare. Hoplite warfare, the dominant Greek military tradition, depended heavily on disciplined formation, coordinated movement, and collective restraint within the phalanx, qualities closer to Athena’s domain than to the individual, chaotic bloodlust Ares embodies. A god who represented pure battle-frenzy without discipline wasn’t simply less popular for arbitrary reasons; he represented a mode of fighting the actual Greek military tradition had specifically moved away from privileging.
Caught in Hephaestus’s Net
Ares’s most famous individual myth, preserved most fully in Homer’s Odyssey, involves his affair with Aphrodite, wife of the smith god Hephaestus. Helios, who sees everything during his daily journey across the sky, witnesses the affair and reports it to Hephaestus, who responds not with direct confrontation but with characteristically clever craftsmanship: he forges a net so fine it’s invisible to the eye and rigs it above his own marriage bed. The next time Ares and Aphrodite meet there, the net drops, trapping the pair together, and Hephaestus summons the other gods to witness the humiliating scene before eventually releasing them.
The assembled gods’ reaction is telling. Rather than expressing outrage on Hephaestus’s behalf, several openly laugh at the spectacle, and Hermes reportedly says he would gladly endure similar humiliation for the chance to lie beside Aphrodite himself. That response reveals something about how ancient audiences seem to have received the story: less as a serious meditation on marital betrayal and more as a comic episode, with Ares cast as the butt of the joke, caught quite literally in the act by a husband generally considered less physically impressive but considerably more clever.
Children Who Personify Battle’s Terror
With Aphrodite, despite the affair’s humiliating exposure, Ares fathers several children who extend his own battlefield associations directly into personification. Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Dread) are described as his sons, frequently depicted accompanying him into battle as living embodiments of the terror that war produces in those who face it. Harmonia, also a daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, represents something rather different, concord and harmony, an intriguing contrast suggesting that even the union of war’s violence and love’s desire could, in this one case, produce something closer to reconciliation than conflict. Harmonia later becomes the wife of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, tying Ares’s lineage directly into that city’s own foundational mythology.
Cadmus and the Dragon of Ares
Ares’s mythology connects to the founding of Thebes through a different, more directly hostile episode. Cadmus, searching for his sister Europa after Zeus’s abduction of her, is instructed by an oracle to found a city where a certain cow lies down to rest. When his companions go to fetch water for a sacrifice from a nearby spring, they’re killed by a dragon sacred to Ares guarding the site. Cadmus kills the dragon in turn and, following Athena’s instructions, sows its teeth into the ground, from which armed warriors spring up and fight one another until only five survive, becoming the ancestors of Theban nobility.
Because he killed a creature sacred to Ares, Cadmus is required to serve the god for a period of penance, eight years according to some sources, before he is permitted to marry Harmonia, Ares’s own daughter, an arrangement that transforms an initial act of violence against the war god’s sacred animal into an eventual, formal familial alliance.
Minimal Cult Worship
Despite his prominence in myth and epic poetry, actual cult worship dedicated specifically to Ares was notably limited across most of the Greek world compared to other major Olympians. Sparta, with its militaristic culture, maintained some of the more significant Ares worship among Greek city-states, a detail that fits coherently with Spartan society’s broader emphasis on disciplined martial life, though even there Ares’s cult never approached the centrality of deities like Zeus or Athena in most Greek civic religion generally. This relative absence of dedicated worship reinforces the broader pattern already visible in his mythology and epithets: Ares was acknowledged as a genuine, necessary cosmic force, war does happen and must be accounted for religiously, but he was rarely beloved or actively courted the way gods associated with more clearly beneficial domains typically were.
The Amazons and Ares’s Wider Associations
Later Greek tradition sometimes connects Ares to the Amazons, a legendary tribe of warrior women, describing them variously as his daughters or as a people under his particular patronage and favor. That association extends Ares’s domain beyond individual battlefield violence into a broader cultural imagination about societies organized primarily around martial life, though the Amazon myths themselves carry their own complex history within Greek storytelling, frequently functioning as a way for Greek audiences to imagine, and ultimately narratively defeat, a fundamentally inverted social order.
Roman Mars: A Dramatically Different Reception
Ares’s Roman counterpart, Mars, received a reception in Roman culture almost entirely opposite to Ares’s relatively marginal status in Greek religion. Mars ranked among the most important gods in the entire Roman pantheon, second in significance perhaps only to Jupiter himself, credited as the father of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, making him a direct divine ancestor of the Roman people and state rather than a disliked, largely unworshipped figure on the margins of religious life. That dramatic difference in reception between the Greek and Roman versions of essentially the same god offers a clear illustration of how differently two closely related cultures could regard the same underlying mythological figure depending on their own particular relationship to war, military identity, and national founding narrative.
Ares in the Trojan War
Ares’s role in the Iliad extends beyond his brief wounding and complaint to Zeus. He fights on the Trojan side for much of the war, at various points opposed directly by both Athena and, notably, by the mortal hero Diomedes, who wounds Ares in battle with Athena’s direct assistance, a scene ancient audiences would have understood as a pointed statement about which approach to combat the poem ultimately favors. That a mortal warrior, aided by the goddess of strategic warfare, can wound the god of war himself speaks to how thoroughly the Iliad subordinates Ares’s brute divine power to the value of skill, courage, and tactical support properly applied.
For the full picture of how Ares fits among the Twelve Olympians, see the Twelve Olympians guide, part of Godspire’s complete guide to the Greek pantheon.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why was Ares disliked by the other gods?
Ares represents war’s raw, chaotic violence and bloodlust rather than strategic or disciplined combat. In Homer’s Iliad, Zeus openly calls him the most hateful of his children, reflecting a broader ancient preference for Athena’s more calculated approach to warfare over Ares’s undirected battle-fury.
What is the difference between Ares and Athena as war gods?
Athena represents strategic, disciplined, and defensive warfare, consistently favored in ancient sources and typically victorious when the two gods directly clash. Ares represents violence for its own sake, without higher purpose or strategic direction.
What happened when Hephaestus caught Ares and Aphrodite together?
Hephaestus forged an invisible net and trapped the pair in the act during an affair, then summoned the other gods to witness the humiliating scene, a story generally treated in ancient sources as comic rather than tragic.
Why was Mars so much more important in Rome than Ares was in Greece?
Mars was credited as the father of Romulus and Remus, Rome’s legendary founders, giving him direct ancestral significance to the Roman state that Ares never held in Greek religious practice, where his cult worship remained comparatively minor.
Kaiqui Damasceno is a mythology writer and researcher dedicated to exploring the stories, gods, heroes, and ancient traditions that shaped human culture. Through engaging storytelling and thoughtful analysis, Kaiqui brings mythology to life, uncovering the deeper meanings, conflicts, symbols, and timeless lessons hidden within ancient myths.
