He embodies the physical valor necessary for success in war but can also personify sheer brutality and bloodlust, in contrast to his sister Athena, whose martial functions include military strategy and generalship.

The later belief that ancient Spartans had offered human sacrifice to Ares may owe more to mythical prehistory, misunderstandings, and reputation than to reality.

Most famously, when the craftsman-god Hephaestus discovers his wife Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares, he traps the lovers in a net and exposes them to the ridicule of the other gods.

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.

[3] The earliest attested form of the name is the Mycenaean Greek 𐀀𐀩, a-re, written in the Linear B syllabic script.

[8][9] Enyalios was sometimes identified with Ares and sometimes differentiated from him as another war god with separate cult, even in the same town; Burkert describes them as "doubles almost".

Each was told to set up a statue of "bloody, man-slaying Ares" and provide it with an annual festival in which it was ritually bound with iron fetters ("by Dike and Hermes") as if a supplicant for justice, put on trial and offered sacrifice.

The oracle promises that "thus will he become a peaceful deity for you, once he has driven the enemy horde far from your country, and he will give rise to prosperity much prayed for."

Reports of historic human sacrifice to Ares in an obscure rite known as the Hekatomphonia represent a very long-standing error, repeated through several centuries and well into the modern era.

[n 5][27][28] Pausanias reports that in Sparta, each company of youths sacrificed a puppy to Enyalios before engaging in a hand-to-hand "fight without rules" at the Phoebaeum.

[31] Porphyry claims, without detail, that Apollodorus of Athens (circa second century BC) says the Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares, but this may be a reference to mythic pre-history.

The "Scythian Ares" was offered blood-sacrifices (or ritual killings) of cattle, horses and "one in every hundred human war-captives", whose blood was used to douse the sword.

Ares was linked in some regions or polities with a local god or cultic hero, and recognised as a higher, more prestigious deity than in mainland Greece.

His cults in southern Asia Minor are attested from the 5th century BC and well into the later Roman Imperial era, at 29 different sites, and on over 70 local coin issues.

[37] He is sometimes represented on coinage of the region by the "Helmet of Ares" or carrying a spear and a shield, or as a fully armed warrior, sometimes accompanied by a female deity.

[38] A sanctuary of Aphrodite was established at Sta Lenika, on Crete, between the cities of Lato and Olus, possibly during the Geometric period.

[41][42] In Africa, Maḥrem, the principal god of the kings of Aksum prior to the 4th century AD, was invoked as Ares in Greek inscriptions.

The anonymous king who commissioned the Monumentum Adulitanum in the late 2nd or early 3rd century refers to "my greatest god, Ares, who also begat me, through whom I brought under my sway [various peoples]".

In Greek literature, Ares often represents the physical or violent and untamed aspect of war and is the personification of sheer brutality and bloodlust ("overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering", as Burkert puts it), in contrast to his sister, the armored Athena, whose functions as a goddess of intelligence include military strategy and generalship.

[2] In reality, Thebes came to dominate Boeotia's great and fertile plain, which in both history and myth was a battleground for competing polities.

In the Illiad, Ares helps the Trojans because of his affection for their divine protector, Aphrodite; she thus redirects his innate destructive savagery to her own purposes.

[41][42] In one archaic myth, related only in the Iliad by the goddess Dione to her daughter Aphrodite, two chthonic giants, the Aloadae, named Otus and Ephialtes, bound Ares in chains and imprisoned him in a bronze urn, where he remained for thirteen months, a lunar year.

[62] In the 2nd century AD Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis, when the monstrous Typhon attacked Olympus the gods transformed into animals and fled to Egypt; Ares changed into a fish, the Lepidotus (sacred to the Egyptian war-god Anhur).

[66] Ares overhears that his son Ascalaphus has been killed and wants to change sides again, rejoining the Achaeans for vengeance, disregarding Zeus's order that no Olympian should join the battle.

Cycnus (Κύκνος) of Macedonia was a son of Ares who tried to build a temple to his father with the skulls and bones of guests and travellers.

Polyphonte was cursed by Aphrodite to love and mate with a bear, producing two sons, Agrius and Oreius, who were hubristic toward the gods and had a habit of eating their guests.

In another, his lover, the goddess Venus, gave birth to Aeneas, the Trojan prince and refugee who "founded" Rome several generations before Romulus.

Greek writers under Roman rule also recorded cult practices and beliefs pertaining to Mars under the name of Ares.

In literary works of these eras, Ares is replaced by the Roman Mars, a romantic emblem of manly valor rather than the cruel and blood-thirsty god of Greek mythology.