What interesting children did he have?Īres fathered many notable children, especially due to his affair with Aphrodite. This armour was not able to protect him from being injured though, as both Athena and Hercules drew blood from the God. In classical art, Ares is shown to be a fully dressed warrior, wearing a helmet, armour, and carrying shield and spear.
Athena defeated him on several occasions, and also Hercules bested him. Although he was the God of War, he was not the strongest of the Gods. He was the master of conflict but more in a physical sense that a tactical one. Then Hephaestus called all of the Olympians to ridicule and shame them.Īres - credits: santi0103/depositphotos What powers and skills does he have?Īres had a varied array of talents and skills. In one well-known story, Aphrodite and Ares are captured naked in bed by Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus (the God of Fire) who crafted an unbreakable golden chain-link net so tiny as to be invisible. Ares in Greek MythologyĪlthough Ares does not often appear in many of the Greek tales of the gods, when he does, he usually found to suffer some form of humiliation. He perhaps represents battle rage more than anything else. For the most part, he is described as brutal, quick to anger, violent and eager to fight. He promptly left the battlefield to go to complain to his father Zeus about Athena’s violence toward him! Most scholars however, think this was put in for comic effect rather than as a representation of how Ares was thought about. However, he was wounded by a spear guided by Athena (the Goddess of War), hurled at him by the hero Diomedes. For example, in Homer's Iliad, he is shown in a less than positive light, literally running back home when he is injured on the battle field! In this account during the time of the Trojan War, Ares took the side of Aphrodite (his lover and Goddess of Love) and fought for Hector on the side of the Trojans. There are different versions of Ares and his personality, depending on the source material.