Ares Is Actually Kind of Pathetic

Sometimes it can be fun to debate which of the Twelve Olympians in Greek mythology were more powerful than others. Obviously, there is no doubting that Zeus was the most powerful, but the others are open to discussion. Because what a person considers “powerful” varies from one person to another, you can often make a case one way or another. I, however, think that the weakest of the Twelve Olympians in Greek mythology is clear and obvious: Ares.

I know, everyone here is probably shocked and surprised. After all, everyone is used to seeing Ares portrayed as some kind of all-powerful villain. That is certainly how he is portrayed in the superhero film Wonder Woman, which just came out in 2017. It is also along the lines of how a slightly cheesier Ares was portrayed in the cult television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995 – 1999) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995 – 2001).

I just did a search for “Ares” on Google Images and these are the sorts of images that came up:

Ares looks terrifying! Based on his portrayal in modern popular culture, we would expect Ares to be one of the most powerful Greek gods.

As I have noted many times previously on this website, however, modern popular culture has an uncanny propensity to distort and misrepresent ancient myths. For instance, in this article from 2016, I talked about how, despite the fact that modern films almost always seem to make Hades out to be a villain, in the actual mythology, he is really one of the more moderate deities.

Modern filmmakers, television producers, and artists have every right to do this, of course. After all, they do have artistic license and they have every legal right to make Hades as wicked and villainous or Ares as powerful and intimidating as they like. Indeed, if we required all writers and filmmakers to stick strictly to the original myths, we would be depriving them of all sorts of creative opportunities. These stories are part of an ongoing storytelling tradition and, with each new retelling, the ancient tradition grows ever richer.

Nonetheless, it is interesting how, if we look at actual ancient Greek mythology, Ares is a surprisingly minor—and surprisingly pitiful—deity. He appears a few times in the Homeric poems, but he is portrayed as a disgrace and a laughingstock for all the other deities. He is essentially portrayed as just a big, dumb thug who rushes into things and never thinks anything through and always ends up getting epically beaten or shown up by someone else (pun fully intended).

Ares gets wounded by a mortal hero Diomedes and chastised by Zeus

Towards the end of Book V of the Iliad, in Ares’s first major appearance in literature, he is wounded on the battlefield by the mortal Greek hero Diomedes. This in itself is humiliation enough for Ares to be seriously wounded by a mortal—something which almost never happens to deities.

ABOVE: Illustration of Diomedes casting by spear at Ares, from 1895 by the English illustrator John Flaxman, showing a scene from Book V of the Iliad

Believe it or not, it gets even more embarrassing for Ares; he immediately afterwards goes fleeing back to Mount Olympos to complain to Zeus. When he arrives in the palace of the gods, Zeus himself, Ares’s own father, chastises him, saying, as translated by Robert Fitzgerald:

“Do not come whining here, you two-faced brute,
most hateful to me of all the Olympians.
Combat and brawling are your element.
This beastly, incorrigible truculence
comes from your mother, Hera, whom I keep
but barely in my power, say what I will.
You came to grief, I think, at her command.
Still, I will not have you suffer longer.
I fathered you, after all;
your mother bore you as a son to me.
If you had been conceived by any other
and born so indecent, then long ago
your place would have been far below the gods.”

Ouch! Can you even imagine a harsher thing for a father to say to his son? Zeus literally just told Ares that the only reason he even lets him live on Olympos is because he is the son of Hera and one of Zeus’s few legitimate offspring.

Ares gets trapped in a bronze jar for over a full year before being rescued by Hermes

Yet, this is not even the most humiliating thing that is described as happening to Ares in Book V of the Iliad. Earlier in the same book, Zeus tells Aphrodite, once again in Fitzgerald’s translation:

“Many of us who live upon Olympos
have taken hurt from mortal men, and hurt each other.
Ares bore it, when Otos and Ephialtes,
Aloeus’ giant sons, put him in chains:
he lay for thirteen moons in a bronze jar,
until that glutton of war might well have perished
had Eëriboia, their stepmother,
not told Hermes: Hermes broke him free
more dead than alive, worn out by the iron chain.”

Oh yes, you read that correctly! During the Gigantomachia, the war between the Olympians and the Gigantes, Ares was trapped by two Gigantes in a bronze jar for thirteen months and had to be rescued by Hermes! Just imagine the humiliation of the war-god at the very thought of having to be rescued by the messenger of the gods.

Ares and Aphrodite get caught by Hephaistos in the act of adultery and mocked by all the gods

This, however, is only the beginning of Ares’s long, illustrious career as an impotent god. Who could possibly forget the famous tale told by the blind bard Demodokos in Book VIII of the Odyssey of how Ares was having an affair with Aphrodite, who, according to the Odyssey, was married to Hephaistos, the lame patron god of craftsmen. (By “lame” I mean literally “lame,” as in he literally could not walk.)

Helios, the sun-god, saw Aphrodite having sex with Ares in Hephaistos’s own bed and told Hephaistos. Hephaistos went to his forge on the island of Lemnos and fashioned a golden net as thin and light as a cobweb—so thin that even the gods themselves would not be able to see it. He hung this net over the bed. Then, the next day, while Hephaistos was away at the forge, Ares came to have sex with Aphrodite again.

As soon as the amorous couple climbed into the bed, however, the net Hephaistos had fashioned fell upon them, leaving both of them perfectly immobilized in the very act of intercourse. Then Helios told Hephaistos that the lovers had been captured. Hephaistos returned from Lemnos invited all the other gods to come and laugh at Ares for thinking he could sleep with another god’s wife and get away with it.

At first, Poseidon, Apollon, and Hermes all mocked Ares and laughed at him, but then Apollon asked Hermes if he would be willing to bear such chains if only to sleep with Aphrodite. Hermes replied, as Fitzgerald translates:

“Would I not, though, Apollo of great distances!
Wrap me in chains three times the weight of these,
come goddesses and gods to see the fun;
only let me lie beside the pale-golden one!”

Poseidon then offered to pay for Ares’s release and Hephaistos agreed.

ABOVE: Roman fresco from the “House of Mars and Venus” in Pompeii, dating to the first century AD, depicting Aphrodite consorting with Ares

ABOVE: Mars and Venus Surprised by the Gods, painted between c. 1606 and c. 1610 by the Dutch Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael

Ares literally gets blasted by Hephaistos with a flame-thrower and shown up by Dionysos

This is not the only time when Hephaistos bested Ares, however. According to a more obscure myth recorded in Libanios’s Narrations 7 and several other ancient sources, long, long before any of the events I have thus far discussed ever happened, when Hephaistos first came to adulthood, he sought vengeance against his wicked mother Hera, who had thrown him off Mount Olympos as an infant. He sent Hera a beautiful throne, more magnificent than any other, but, as soon as she sat down upon it, she was instantly bound with invisible, unbreakable chains.

None of the other gods could free Hera, so they sent word to Hephaistos to come free his mother. Hephaistos retorted that he had no mother. Then Ares volunteered to go fight Hephaistos and bring him back to Olympos. Ares barged in on Hephaistos’s forge with his spear. Hephaistos blasted Ares with a literal flame-thrower of fiery molten metal and Ares returned, defeated and badly wounded.

Next, Dionysos took a more subtle approach. He went to Hephaistos with wine and befriended him and convinced him to come back to Olympos and free Hera, telling him that, if he did so, the gods would be eternally grateful and he would be allowed to claim any prize he desired. Hephaistos agreed and returned with Dionysos. He agreed to unchain Hera, but only if the Olympians would make him an Olympian as well—and give him Aphrodite’s hand in marriage. The gods, seeing no other options, agreed to this. And that is how Hephaistos and Aphrodite were married.

Conclusion

As you can plainly see, this is who Ares really is in Greek mythology. He is the biggest joke in the Greek pantheon. He instinctively rushes into conflicts and violent confrontations head-on without thinking and almost always inevitably ends up getting wounded, making a complete fool of himself, and going back to Mount Olympos, crying to Zeus like a little baby.

It is worth noting that Ares was not widely worshipped in ancient Greece either. For the ancient Greeks, Athena was the preeminent deity of war because she represented what the ancient Greeks viewed as intelligent, heroic warfare: warfare using strategy, forethought, and planning. Ares, on the other hand, represented reckless, foolish warfare, raging bloodlust, unnecessary brutality, and wanton violence.

Why, then, is it that Ares is so often portrayed as such a powerful figure in modern popular representations of Greek mythology? It may be because, while the ancient Greeks saw Ares as something like a force of nature that needed to be controlled, we today find the idea of an all-powerful god of violence and destruction an appealing adversary to fight against.

The ancient Greeks were as warring and violent a people as ever lived on the face of the earth, but, yet, in their mythology, we can see the glimmers of an understanding of war that many of us living in the twentieth century have largely forgotten.

Our perspective on war has changed drastically over the course of the past century. Prior to World War I, most people generally saw war as something inherently heroic, glorious, and mighty. This was, by and large, how the ancient Greeks saw it too. We have since come to a new perspective of war as something inherently evil and destructive—but we have retained the old view of it as something mighty. We still foolishly think we can end violence by taking up arms and fighting against it.

It will only be after we recognize the impotence and folly of war that we will finally come to understand it. Violence is not something mighty to be fought, but rather an instinctive urge within all of us that must be repressed, held back, and controlled.

ABOVE: Athena Giustiniani, a Roman marble copy of a Greek statue of the goddess Athena dating to around the fifth or fourth century BC