Imagine a culture that fought nearly all the time, whose epic poems were about a war, whose citizens spent a large share of their adult lives in armies. Now imagine asking what they thought of the god of war. If you guessed admiration, you would be wrong. The Greeks mostly disliked Ares. They told stories in which he was beaten up, tricked, humiliated and put in jars. When Zeus speaks to him in the Iliad, it is with open disgust. What I have been trying to work out is why a warrior society would invent a god of war in order to make him look bad.
Zeus loses patience
The scene I mean is in book five of the Iliad. Ares has just been wounded, and he runs to Olympus to complain to his father. Zeus does not comfort him. He tells his son that of all the gods, he is the most hateful to him, because he loves nothing but strife, war and battle. He adds that if Ares had been born to anyone else, he would have been thrown out of heaven long ago.
That is a startling thing to read, because it is Zeus talking about his own son, and it comes in a poem that was recited by people who admired warriors. The poet is willing to let the king of the gods say that war, taken on its own terms, is repulsive. And the cure is nearly instant: Zeus calls the healer, Paieon, and Ares is patched up and sits down again as though nothing had happened. That is the way a good parent deals with a problem child, not a proud one.
Who wounded him
The wound came from a mortal. Diomedes, a Greek hero, had been inspired by Athena that day, and she took the reins of his chariot and told him that he could fight any god except Aphrodite. She guided his spear into Ares' stomach. The god of war bellowed with the sound, Homer says, of nine or ten thousand men shouting at once, and the armies on both sides shook.
Think about that scene. A normal man with a goddess's help hits the god of war and wounds him, and the only thing Ares can do is cry. It is deliberately comic. The poem is showing us that raw violence, however loud, is not the thing that wins fights. What wins is planning, timing and knowledge. That is Athena's territory, and Athena is on the other side of the field, cheerfully steering a mortal's spear.
Two kinds of war
This is where I think the key lies. The Greeks divided war in two. One half was Athena: strategy, discipline, the shield wall, the well-drilled phalanx, the siege plan. This is war as a skill, something that can be taught and used for the good of the city. The other half was Ares: fury, panic, bloodlust, the moment when the line breaks and men stop thinking. This is war as an experience.
By splitting it, they could admire one and fear the other. An Athenian could proudly describe his city as a defender of order and law, and also acknowledge that every battlefield contained something frightening that no one could control. The god they assigned to that second thing could not be allowed to win, because if he did, the first thing would collapse. So in nearly every story, he doesn't.
His children make the point clearly. With Aphrodite he has a daughter named Harmonia, and two sons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names mean fear and terror. They ride beside him in battle. That is exactly the combination you would expect: harmony on one side, panic on the other, both coming from the same union. I like how little the Greeks tried to hide the contradiction.
The jar
One of the strangest stories about him is only mentioned briefly, in a passage of the Iliad. Two giants, Otus and Ephialtes, called the Aloadae, captured Ares and shut him in a bronze jar. He stayed there for thirteen months, and nobody on Olympus knew where he was. The god of war, who is supposed to be unstoppable, spent more than a year in a pot, getting weaker, until the giants' stepmother told Hermes, who secretly freed him.
The picture is almost cartoonish. A god so powerful that armies shudder at his name is rescued by the smallest and sneakiest of his siblings, and the only reason he is saved is that somebody noticed he was missing. I find it telling that the story uses the language of storage. War can be bottled up. It can be put away for a while, and if no one is paying attention, it can quietly die down.
The net and the trial
You already know how his affair with Aphrodite ends. Hephaestus catches them under an invisible net and invites the whole of Olympus to come and look. Ares is mortified. He leaves for Thrace, the land associated with him, as soon as he is freed. What stands out in the Odyssey's version is that none of the other gods respect him, even after the incident. They laugh at his bad luck.
Another story gives him an actual trial. His son Halirrhothius assaulted Poseidon's daughter, and Ares killed him. Poseidon demanded justice, and the twelve gods held a hearing on a hill in Athens. Ares was acquitted. The hill came to be known as the Areopagus, the hill of Ares, and it later became the seat of one of Athens's oldest courts, the one that judged cases of murder.
This is a very odd piece of civic mythology. Athens built its homicide court on a spot named after the god of war, and told a story in which that god is the first defendant. I read it as a statement about how a society tries to tame violence. You do not abolish it. You bring it to a hill, call witnesses and have it judged. That might be as close as the Greeks came to the idea that even war has rules.
The Spartans and the chain
The people who were supposed to love him most are the Spartans, and they offer the best evidence of how complicated the relationship was. The traveller Pausanias describes a statue of Enyalios, a war god often identified with Ares, in Sparta. It was bound in chains. The Spartans explained that they did this to keep the war spirit from ever leaving their city.
I have not found a better illustration of Greek attitudes. The most militarised state in Greece did not release its war god. It tied him down, because it believed that the spirit of battle was something you wanted close and under control, and you could never trust it to look after itself. They wanted victory to stay, and they didn't want the thing that produced it to roam free.
What he was for
So here is where I land. Ares is not really a god of war in the sense of a patron saint of soldiers. He is a god of what war feels like from inside it, the roar, the panic, the heat. The Greeks recognised that experience, and they knew it was powerful and necessary and awful. They gave it a face, so that they could talk about it, and then, as a precaution, they made sure the face never won. Every story in which he is wounded, jarred, tricked or tried is a small act of reassurance. War is loud, the myths say, and it is also, in the end, a bit of a fool. It just isn't one you can afford to ignore.