Hate me, you may.
Stop me, you cannot.
For I am in your nature.
I am in your blood.
I feed the fields with blood splattered.
I cover altars in war-spilled blood.
I am the sound of prisoners wailing.
The fires loot from burning cities.
The gore, the kills,
the spoils from every land.
I am the master of arms.
I am rebelliousness.
I am the darkness in all of you.
I am the god of war.
Ares is one of the twelve Greek Olympians,
and the god of war, the spirit of battle,
the personification of violence, and bloodlust.
He was called the bane of mortals,
the slayer of men, the city-stormer,
the armor-clattering.
Known by the Romans with the name Mars,
he represented sheer brutality,
the violent and untamed aspect of brutal warfare and slaughter,
making him a total opposite of the wisdom and war goddess Athena,
who represented the civilized form of war and military strategy.
Ares was the oldest child of Zeus and Hera,
and brother to Illithia, the goddess of childbirth,
Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth,
and Hephaestus, the god of fire and the forge.
Ares is usually depicted wearing a helmet,
a shield, and a blood-stained sword or spear.
He drives a four-horse chariot,
and is followed by dogs or vultures.
He is sometimes shown alongside his sons Deimos and Phobos.
On the battlefield, Ares is often accompanied
by a number of bloodthirsty deities,
each symbolizing the terror of war.
His two sons, Deimos and Phobos,
represented panic and fear.
His comrade or sister, Ares, represented strife.
Caduemos represented confusion,
and the lesser deity, Enyo,
was the sacre of cities and sister of war.
In addition, the Kyres,
who were horrid, grim-eyed female spirits of death,
and who dressed in cloaks, drenched in human blood,
also hovered alongside Ares and his companions during battle.
Now, although Ares was an overwhelming force,
whose mere sight filled mortals with terror,
he was not as mighty and undefeatable as he appeared to be.
There were a number of encounters
where the war god's skills were beaten.
In his battle with Diomedes,
During the Trojan War,
Athena easily bested him,
after which she mocked him,
and bragged of her superiority as a warrior.
Heracles also defeated Ares twice,
first during the battle of Pylos,
and then after killing Ares' son, Cyclus.
In addition, Homer tells us,
that the twin brothers, Otus and Dephialtus,
once abducted the war god,
and locked him up in a bronze jar for 13 months,
with not the slightest means of escape.
Perhaps, if their stepmother, Ereb Boia,
hadn't told the messenger god, Hermes, about the incident,
Ares would have spent eternity in that bronze jar.
Since he was the savage and brutal god of senseless war,
Ares was neither loved by gods nor by men,
except Aphrodite, goddess of beauty,
whom he had an adulterous affair with.
He was repulsive to his own father, Zeus,
to the extent that,
after he was wounded in battle by Diomedes,
Zeus called him the most hateful of all the gods,
adding that if Ares hadn't been his son,
he would have surely thrown him into Tartarus,
with Cronus and the rest of the titans.
The war god had perhaps a lot of consorts,
with the most popular being the goddess Aphrodite,
who was at that time married to his brother Hephaestus.
Aphrodite bore him Deimos, Phobos, and Harmonia,
and the four Erotes.
Ares also fathered a whole race of female warriors,
known as the Amazons.
His consort, Otrera,
bore him the most famous four Amazons,
who were by names Hippolyta, Antiope,
Melanepe, and Penthesilea.
