60 Fun Facts About Ares

Ares is the Greek god of what?

He embodied the raw physical side of battle, while his sister Athena handled strategy and generalship.

Who were the parents of Ares?

That made him a full-blooded Olympian, unlike many of Zeus's children by mortals and nymphs.

Ares was one of how many Olympian gods?

His sister Athena, goddess of strategy, was another; the Greeks usually sacrificed to her rather than to Ares before battle.

Which goddess was Ares's famous lover, caught with him in a trap set by her husband?

According to Hesiod their children included Phobos and Deimos, who rode into battle with their father.

Which god netted Ares and his lover in an invisible trap and invited the Olympians to laugh?

The goddesses stayed away out of modesty; the male gods came to look and joked that they would happily swap places with Ares.

Which god spotted the affair and reported it to the wronged husband?

The story is sung by a bard in the hall of Alcinous in the Odyssey.

After the net incident, the embarrassed Ares retreated to which region, considered his birthplace?

The Greeks associated him with the Thracians, whom they regarded as barbarous and warlike.

Ares turned his sleepy sentry Alectryon into which animal, which now announces the sun?

Alectryon had been posted at the door to warn of the sun's arrival and fell asleep on duty.

What are the names of Ares's two companions in war, personifying dread and fear?

The two moons of the red planet were named after them when they were discovered in 1877.

Which American astronomer discovered the two moons of Mars, named for Ares's sons, in 1877?

He found them from the US Naval Observatory in Washington; craters on Deimos are named for Swift and Voltaire, who both wrote of two Martian moons long before.

Which daughter of Ares married Cadmus, founder of Thebes?

The marriage was Cadmus's way of making peace with Ares after killing the god's dragon.

In the founding myth of Thebes, Ares was the father of what creature slain by Cadmus?

Its sown teeth sprang up as the armoured Spartoi, and Cadmus had to serve the god to atone.

How long did Cadmus serve Ares to atone for killing the dragon?

Plutarch says the Boeotian plain around Thebes was anciently called 'the dancing-floor of Ares'.

In the Argonautica, who steals the Golden Fleece from a grove sacred to Ares?

The Birds of Ares also defended an Amazon shrine to him on a Black Sea island by dropping feather darts.

The giants Otus and Ephialtes imprisoned Ares in a bronze urn for how long?

That is a lunar year; Artemis later tricked the giants into killing each other.

Which god rescued Ares from the bronze urn after the giants' stepmother revealed what they had done?

The story is told in the Iliad by Dione to her daughter.

In the Iliad, which Greek hero wounded Ares with a spear driven home by Athena?

Ares fled bellowing to Olympus, and the side he was helping had to fall back.

In the Iliad, which side did Ares end up fighting for after being persuaded by his lover?

He had promised Athena and Hera he would fight for the Greeks, but changed his mind.

How did Athena overpower Ares when he attacked her later in the Iliad?

He was trying to avenge his earlier wounding once Zeus let the gods rejoin the fighting.

Which son of Ares was killed at Troy, making the god want to switch sides again to avenge him?

Athena stopped him from defying Zeus's order that no Olympian should join the battle.

Which mortal son of Ares tried to build a temple to his father out of the skulls and bones of travellers?

Heracles fought him, and in one version Zeus had to part Ares and Heracles with a thunderbolt afterwards.

When the monster Typhon attacked Olympus and the gods fled to Egypt as animals, what did Ares become?

Specifically the Lepidotus, a fish sacred to the Egyptian war god Anhur, according to Antoninus Liberalis.

On the Areopagus, Ares was said to have been tried for killing whose son?

The victim, Halirrhothius, had raped Ares's daughter Alcippe; the gods acquitted him.

In the New Testament, which apostle delivered a famous sermon on the Areopagus in Athens?

Acts 17 says the speech led to the conversion of Dionysius the Areopagite.

In Sparta, what animal did each company of youths sacrifice to the war god before their 'fight without rules'?

The night-time dog sacrifice was later folded into the cult of Ares.

Spartans offered Ares a cockerel for a victory by onslaught and what for a victory by stratagem?

The famous story of Spartan human sacrifice to Ares is a centuries-old error; the hekatomphonia was an animal offering to Zeus.

According to Herodotus, the Scythians worshipped their form of Ares through what cult object?

They doused it with the blood of cattle, horses and human captives.

What did the Scythians reportedly sacrifice to their Ares from among prisoners of war?

The blood was poured over the sword; the Alans may have kept a similar sword cult.

An oracle told Pamphylian cities to bind a statue of Ares each year with what before trying it?

The promise was that Ares would then drive off pirates and become 'a peaceful deity' and giver of fruits.

In parts of which region was Ares, unusually, an oracular deity with cults at 29 sites?

The Hellenistic city of Metropolis in what is now western Turkey built him a monumental temple as its protector.

The kings of which African kingdom invoked their chief god Maḥrem as Ares in Greek inscriptions?

Ezana, its last pagan king, called himself the offspring of 'the invincible Ares' in the early 4th century.

What is Ares's nearest counterpart among the Roman gods?

The Roman god was far more dignified: an ancestral protector of the state and father of Romulus.

According to Ovid, how did the birth of Ares's Roman counterpart differ from the Greek version?

A rival Greek scholion says the opposite: that Ares was born of Zeus alone after drinking Nile water.

In Renaissance and Neoclassical art, which bird is associated with Ares?

His animal is the dog and his symbols are a spear and helmet.

The name Ares is traditionally linked to a Greek word meaning what?

Walter Burkert reads it as an old abstract noun for the throng of battle; the name already appears in Linear B.

Which epithet, also a separate war god with his own cult, was attached to Ares in the Classical period?

It appears on a Mycenaean tablet from Knossos; Burkert calls the two 'doubles almost'.

The Homeric epithet 'brotoloigos', applied to Ares, means what?

Sophocles went further and called him 'apotimos', dishonoured, and another epithet calls him 'complete evil'.

Which goddess of discord was considered the sister and companion of Ares?

Enyo, goddess of bloodshed, filled the same role in other traditions.

Ares's daughter Polyphonte was cursed by Aphrodite to mate with which animal?

The family was turned into birds; her servant asked not to become an ill omen and was made a woodpecker.

Ares's jealous lover punished which dawn goddess with insatiable lust after catching her with him?

The curse explains that goddess's long list of mortal lovers.

In the 2005 video game God of War, who is tasked by Athena with killing Ares?

The Spartan hero's motive is revenge: Ares tricked him into killing his own wife and daughter.

In God of War (2005), what object does the hero seek as the only thing capable of stopping Ares?

Ares is besieging Athens out of hatred for Athena while the hero hunts for it.

Which actor played Ares in the 2017 film Wonder Woman?

He returned to the role in Zack Snyder's Justice League in 2021.

In which year did Ares first appear in DC's Wonder Woman comics, written by William Moulton Marston?

He was called by his Roman name for the next 45 years until George Pérez and Greg Potter restored the Greek one.

Which emperor rededicated a Temple of Ares moved into the Athenian agora to the Roman avenging war-god?

Pausanias notes it, along with an altar of Ares at Olympia; formal cults of Ares in mainland Greece were rare.

According to Libanius, which fruit was sacred to Ares?

Apples were more usually the love goddess's, and dreaming of sour ones was said to foretell conflict.

Ares's Roman counterpart Mars was revered as the father of which legendary founder of Rome?

That paternity gave Mars a dignified role as guardian of the whole Roman state, far above Ares's standing in Greece.

The Birds of Ares defended a Black Sea shrine of which warrior women, whose queen was his daughter?

The birds drop feather darts on intruders at the shrine, sited on a coastal island in the Black Sea.

In Renaissance and Neoclassical art, which animal is Ares's?

His symbols in the same period are a spear and helmet, and his bird is the vulture.

Before becoming Rome's pre-eminent military god, Mars was originally a deity of what?

Under Greek influence his myths were reinterpreted from those of Ares until the two figures became almost indistinguishable in Western art.

Which actor voiced Ares in the 2009 animated film Wonder Woman?

In that film Ares had earlier been rendered mortal and imprisoned on Themyscira after a war in which his son Thrax was killed.

In the game Injustice: Gods Among Us, why have Ares's powers diminished under Superman's Regime?

That is why he reluctantly sides with Batman's Insurgency against the One Earth Regime.

In DC's New 52 continuity, Ares is commonly referred to by what name?

He debuted there in Wonder Woman (vol. 4) #4 as a bald, aged man with a white beard, mentoring his half-sister Diana.

Which god of requited love was born of the union of Ares and Aphrodite?

The same union produced Eros, Phobos, Deimos and Harmonia, and in some versions the daughter Alcippe.

Which personification of the Greek war-cry lent her name to Ares's own battle shout?

She was the daughter of Polemos, a minor war spirit; Ares was also accompanied by Kydoimos, the daemon of battle din.

Who bought the Ares Borghese, a 2.11-metre Roman marble, from the Borghese collection in 1807?

Copies of the type were paired with Venus de Milo-style statues to portray imperial couples as the union of war and peace.

Which young sculptor lightly restored the Ludovisi Ares after its 1622 rediscovery in Rome?

Winckelmann later called it the most beautiful Mars preserved from antiquity; an Eros plays at the seated god's feet.

Golden Age Mars's deputies were the Duke of Deception, the Count of Conquest and the Earl of what?

From a citadel on the planet Mars, he beamed thoughts of conquest and deception into the Axis leaders during World War II.

In one Greek scholion, Zeus fathered Ares alone after drinking from which 'life-giving' river?

The tale is the mirror image of Ovid's claim that Mars was born to Juno with no father at all.

According to Pausanias, the people of Therapne near Sparta named whom as the nurse of Ares?

Her name means 'feral' or 'savage', a fitting nanny for a god of bloodlust.