Ares

Ares
God of courage and war
Member of the Twelve Olympians
Statue of Ares from Hadrian's Villa
Abode	Mount Olympus, Thrace, Macedonia, Thebes, Sparta & Mani
Planet	Mars
Symbols	Sword, spear, shield, helmet, chariot, flaming torch, dog, boar, vulture
Day	Tuesday (hēmérā Áreōs)
Personal information
Parents	Zeus and Hera
Siblings	Aeacus, Angelos, Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Dionysus, Eileithyia, Enyo, Eris, Ersa, Hebe, Helen of Troy, Hephaestus, Heracles, Hermes, Minos, Pandia, Persephone, Perseus, Rhadamanthus, the Graces, the Horae, the Litae, the Muses, the Moirai
Children	Erotes (Eros and Anteros), Phobos, Deimos, Phlegyas, Harmonia, Enyalios, Thrax, Oenomaus, Cycnus, and Amazons
Roman equivalent	Mars
Norse equivalent	Týr

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Ares (Mars) caresses Aphrodite (Venus) sitting on a throne. Antique fresco from Pompeii.

Ares (/ˈɛəriːz/; Ancient Greek: Ἄρης, Árēs [árɛːs]) is the Greek god of courage and war. He is one of the Twelve Olympians, and the son of Zeus and Hera. The Greeks were ambivalent toward him. He embodies the physical valor necessary for success in war but can also personify sheer brutality and bloodlust, in contrast to his sister, the armored Athena, whose martial functions include military strategy and generalship. An association with Ares endows places and objects with a savage, dangerous, or militarized quality.

Although Ares' name shows his origins as Mycenaean, his reputation for savagery was thought by some to reflect his likely origins as a Thracian deity. Some cities in Greece and several in Asia Minor held annual festivals to bind and detain him as their protector. In parts of Asia Minor he was an oracular deity. Still further away from Greece, the Scythians were said to ritually kill one in a hundred prisoners of war as an offering to their equivalent of Ares, but the later belief that ancient Spartans had offered human sacrifice to Ares may owe more to mythical prehistory and misunderstandings than to reality.

Though there are many literary allusions to his love affairs and children, Ares has a limited role in Greek mythology. When he does appear, he is often humiliated. Most famously, when the craftsman-god Hephaestus discovered his wife Aphrodite was having an affair with Ares, he trapped the lovers in a net and exposed them to the ridicule of the other gods.

His nearest counterpart in Roman religion is Mars, who was given a more important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion. During the Hellenization of Latin literature, the myths of Ares were reinterpreted by Roman writers under the name of Mars, and in later Western art and literature, the mythology of the two figures became virtually indistinguishable.

Names

The etymology of the name Ares is traditionally connected with the Greek word ἀρή (arē), the Ionic form of the Doric ἀρά (ara), "bane, ruin, curse, imprecation".^[1] Walter Burkert notes that "Ares is apparently an ancient abstract noun meaning throng of battle, war."^[2] R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin of the name.^[3]

The earliest attested form of the name is the Mycenaean Greek