Ares: God of War, Violence, and the Battlefield

The Most Hated God on Olympus

Ares holds a unique position in the Greek pantheon: he is the only Olympian whom the other gods actively despise. In Book 5 of Homer's Iliad, when Ares comes whimpering to Olympus after being wounded by the mortal Diomedes, Zeus delivers the most savage parental rejection in all of Greek literature:

"To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympus. Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles... And yet I will not long endure to see you in pain, since you are my child, and it was to me that your mother bore you. But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinous, long since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky." (Iliad 5.889-898, trans. Lattimore)

Zeus is saying, in effect: "I would have thrown you out of heaven if you were not my son." No other Olympian receives this treatment. Even Hephaestus, who was thrown from Olympus as an infant, was eventually welcomed back. Ares is tolerated, not accepted.

Ares is consistently portrayed as a coward beneath the bluster. When wounded, he screams and flees. When outmatched, he retreats. When caught in Hephaestus's net with Aphrodite, he has nothing to say while the other gods laugh. He is all surface, all force, all noise, with nothing behind it. The Greeks understood that genuine courage (andreia) is quiet, disciplined, and intelligent. Ares's shrieking violence is its opposite.

Ares vs. Athena: Two Gods of War

The Greek division of warfare between Ares and Athena is one of the most psychologically precise constructs in any mythology. Both gods fight. Both carry weapons. Both enter the battlefield. But they represent entirely different relationships to violence.

In the Iliad's "Battle of the Gods" (Book 21), Athena confronts Ares directly. Ares hurls his spear. Athena deflects it. Then she picks up a boulder and throws it at his head. Ares collapses. Athena stands over him and says: "Fool, you have not yet learned how much greater I am than you." The scene is humiliating for Ares because it demonstrates that raw force, applied without intelligence, is not even strong. It is just loud.

Ares in the Iliad: Screaming Like Ten Thousand Men

Ares's most vivid appearances in Greek literature are in Homer's Iliad, where he fights on the Trojan side. His entry into battle is described in terms of sheer physical impact. When he is wounded by Diomedes's spear (guided by Athena), his scream is one of the most extraordinary images in Homer:

"Brazen Ares bellowed with a sound as great as nine thousand men make, or ten thousand, when they cry in the clamour of Enyalios, the war god." (Iliad 5.859-861, trans. Lattimore)

The scream is Ares in his essence: enormous, terrifying, and completely without content. It communicates nothing except pain and rage. It is the sound of war stripped of everything except its noise.

Ares's role in the Iliad also includes being captured by the Aloadae (the giants Otus and Ephialtes), who imprisoned him in a bronze jar for thirteen months until Hermes freed him. This imprisonment by mortals further diminishes his divine dignity. No other Olympian is captured and held by human or semi-human figures. Ares can be contained, which means he is not as powerful as he appears.

Ares and Aphrodite: War in the Bedroom

The love affair between Ares and Aphrodite is one of the most retold stories in Greek mythology. Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, the lame smith god, in an arranged marriage that pleased neither party. She turned to Ares, and their affair was passionate, extended, and indiscreet.

Helios, the sun (who sees everything), spotted the lovers together and informed Hephaestus. The craftsman god forged an invisible net of golden chains, so fine they could not be seen but so strong they could not be broken. He set the trap over the bed and announced that he was leaving for Lemnos.

Ares and Aphrodite went to bed. The net fell. They were pinned, naked and entangled, unable to move. Hephaestus summoned the Olympian gods to witness the spectacle. The reaction of the gods is telling: they laughed. Hermes said he would happily take Ares's place, net and all, if it meant lying with Aphrodite. Poseidon eventually brokered Ares's release by guaranteeing payment of a fine.

Phobos and Deimos: The Children of Battlefield Terror

The children of Ares and Aphrodite form one of the most symbolically complete families in Greek mythology:

• Eros: Desire, the force that draws people toward each other (sometimes attributed to Aphrodite alone, but in some traditions he is the child of both).
• Phobos (Fear): The personification of panic and rout on the battlefield. He drives Ares's chariot and scatters armies not through strength but through terror. The English word "phobia" descends from his name.
• Deimos (Terror): Phobos's brother and companion, representing the deeper, more paralysing form of fear. Mars's two moons are named Phobos and Deimos.
• Harmonia: The most surprising child. Harmony, the reconciliation of opposites. Born from the union of war and love, Harmonia suggests that when aggression and desire are genuinely united (not suppressed or denied), the result is balance.

The presence of Harmonia among the children of Ares is the key to understanding this god's deeper significance. Ares is not only destruction. He is one half of a polarity that, when completed, produces balance. The problem is not that Ares exists. The problem is that he exists alone, without Aphrodite's counterweight, without the integration that produces Harmonia.

Thrace: The Homeland of the War God

Greek tradition placed Ares's homeland in Thrace, the region north of Greece that the Greeks considered barbarous, cold, and warlike. The Thracians were renowned warriors, frequently serving as mercenaries in Greek armies while being culturally despised by the Greeks who hired them.

The association of Ares with Thrace is a cultural statement. The Greeks projected their own discomfort with violence onto a neighbouring people. "We are civilised. We fight with strategy (Athena). They are barbarous. They fight with fury (Ares)." This projection allowed the Greeks to use violence extensively while maintaining the myth that their violence was qualitatively different from the violence of others.

Walter Burkert notes in Greek Religion that Ares's limited cult in mainland Greece reflects not a lack of violence in Greek society but an unwillingness to honour it directly. The Greeks fought, conquered, and enslaved on a massive scale. They simply did not want to build temples to the impulse that made that possible. Ares was the god they needed but refused to worship.

Cult and Worship: Where Ares Was Honoured

Despite his unpopularity, Ares had several cult sites:

• The Areopagus (Athens): The "Hill of Ares," where Athens's council for murder trials met. Ares was tried here for killing Poseidon's son Halirrhothius (who had raped Ares's daughter Alcippe). He was acquitted, establishing the precedent of the court. The connection between Ares and the murder court is telling: his domain is where blood has been shed and justice must respond.
• Sparta: The most militaristic Greek city-state gave Ares more respect than Athens did. Spartan warriors sacrificed to Ares before battle, and a statue of Ares in chains stood in the city, symbolically binding the god of war to Sparta's service.
• Thrace: His primary cult region, where warrior culture gave his energy direct expression.
• Temple in the Athenian Agora: A temple to Ares stood in Athens's central marketplace, possibly relocated from another site. Its presence in the civic centre suggests an attempt to domesticate and contain his energy within the bounds of civilised life.

Mars: How Rome Redeemed the God of War

The Romans performed one of the most remarkable theological transformations in ancient history: they took the most despised Greek god and made him one of their most honoured deities.

This transformation reveals something about the nature of the archetype. The energy is the same: aggression, force, the capacity for violence. What changes is the container. The Greeks had Athena to carry the honourable aspects of warfare, so Ares was left with the dishonourable residue. The Romans merged the two into Mars, creating a single war god who could be both fierce and dignified.

The Ares Archetype: Shadow Aggression and Its Integration

In archetypal psychology, Ares represents the shadow of aggression: the rage, violence, and destructive force that civilised society teaches us to suppress. James Hillman, in works like A Terrible Love of War, argues that this suppression does not eliminate the energy. It drives it underground, where it erupts in distorted forms: road rage, domestic violence, addiction, passive aggression, or the collective violence of war itself.

The shadow work tradition draws heavily on this Jungian understanding. The parts of ourselves we reject (the aggressive, the violent, the rageful) do not disappear when we disown them. They become autonomous, acting out in ways we cannot control. Integrating Ares means acknowledging that you are capable of violence, that this capacity is part of your wholeness, and that it can be directed rather than suppressed.

Ares in the Modern Psyche

Ares shows up in modern life whenever aggression is present but unacknowledged. The executive who destroys careers while insisting they are "just being direct." The parent who screams at a child and then denies it happened. The nation that wages war while calling it "peacekeeping." Ares energy, unintegrated, is always accompanied by denial.

The cultural treatment of Ares also reveals societal attitudes toward aggression. In cultures that suppress anger (many Western middle-class environments, for instance), Ares appears as anxiety, depression, or psychosomatic illness: the body carrying what the psyche refuses to express. In cultures that celebrate aggression (certain sports cultures, military subcultures, online spaces), Ares appears as normalized violence that masquerades as strength.

The Hermetic tradition teaches that every force has a higher and lower octave. Ares's lower octave is blind destruction. His higher octave is Mars: the disciplined warrior who fights for what matters, protects what cannot protect itself, and knows when to put the sword down. The Hermetic Synthesis Course includes practices for working with the martial principle in its constructive form.

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