Ares
Channel: all the knowledge of the universe PRINCIPIA
Date: 2021-12-04

Ares, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2041 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Greek_war_deities
#War_gods
#Martian_deities
#Consorts_of_Aphrodite
#Children_of_Hera
#Metamorphoses_characters
#Deities_in_the_Iliad
#Children_of_Zeus
#Characters_in_Greek_mythology
#Deeds_of_Poseidon
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.
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