Every other Olympian had admirers. Ares, the god of war, had almost none — and that, paradoxically, is the most interesting thing about him. The Greeks worshipped many gods they feared, but Ares they feared and despised, because he embodied the part of war no one wants to admire: not the strategy, not the glory, but the raw, screaming, blood-drunk slaughter of the battlefield.
The God Nobody Loved
In Homer's Iliad, Zeus himself looks on his son and says plainly that of all the gods on Olympus, Ares is the most hateful to him — a god in love with strife and killing for its own sake. Where Athena's warfare was discipline and just cause, Ares was the chaos of combat: the panic, the bloodlust, the meaningless carnage. Even his own father could not stand him.
War as Slaughter, Not Strategy
This split between Ares and Athena is one of the sharpest ideas in Greek myth. Two gods of war — but they could not be more opposed. Athena wins; Ares merely rages. In their myths Athena repeatedly bests him on the battlefield, wisdom triumphing over fury. The Greeks were telling themselves a truth they had learned the hard way: that the warrior who only knows how to kill will always fall to the one who knows why and when.
The Affair and the Net
Ares' great myth is not a battle but a scandal. He took Aphrodite, goddess of love and wife of the smith-god Hephaestus, as his lover. The cuckolded Hephaestus forged a net of unbreakable, invisible chains, trapped the two lovers in bed, and hauled them before the assembled gods to be laughed at. The god of war, undone not by an enemy but by a clever craftsman and his own appetite.
The Children of Fear
From his union with Aphrodite came fitting offspring: Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Terror), who rode before him into battle — but also Harmonia (Harmony), as if to whisper that even from violence and desire, peace can sometimes be born. It is the one redemptive note in the story of a god the Greeks loved to hate.
Two moons of the red planet Mars — the Roman Ares — carry the names of his sons to this day: Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Terror, still circling the god of war.