P05 - Mars
The Greeks hated him.
Zeus called him the most hateful of all the gods. His own father. "Forever quarreling is dear to your heart, wars and battles." Hera, his mother, despised him. Athena defeated him twice in open combat. The mortal Diomedes, a human fighting in the Trojan War, stabbed him with a spear while Athena guided the blade, and Ares fled screaming back to Olympus to complain. Zeus told him to stop whining.
He was the god of war who lost fights. He was the personification of battle who ran from battle the moment a god stood against him. The Athenians, who preferred Athena for war (strategy, discipline, and the kind of war you could win), wrote Ares as a psychotic brute and a coward simultaneously. The Spartans, who sent ten-year-old boys into brutal military training, worshipped him, and even they acknowledged he was violent and barely controllable. The only Olympians consistently fond of him were Aphrodite, his lover, and Hades, who appreciated the steady supply of dead.
He was not popular. He had almost no temples. Almost no cult centers. Almost no festivals. The Greeks knew war was necessary. They just didn't particularly want to honor the force behind it.
The Romans felt completely differently.
Mars was second only to Jupiter in the Roman pantheon. He was the father of Romulus and Remus: the twins who founded Rome, suckled by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber. He raped the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia and she became pregnant with the founders of civilization. The Romans called themselves the sons of Mars. They built him temples, named a month after him, and named the primary military training ground of the entire empire after him: the Campus Martius, or the Field of Mars, which is still a neighborhood in Rome today.
He was not just war. He was spring. March (Martius) was his month because it was when the earth opened and military campaigns resumed simultaneously. The same force that drove a spear also drove a seed into the ground. Fertility and violence as the same gesture. The Roman Mars was the protector of cattle, the guardian of agriculture, the defender of borders, the father of the city. He was loved because Rome was built on blood and they didn't pretend otherwise.
He had a woodpecker.
Picus, a handsome Latin god who could predict the future from birds, was Mars's companion. The woodpecker was his bird, alongside the vulture. His four immortal horses were named Red Fire, Flame, Tumult, and Fear. His chariot was drawn by Terror.
His children with Aphrodite were Eros, Harmonia, Phobos, and Deimos.
Desire, Harmony, Fear, and Dread. That is what happens when you put war and beauty in the same bed. Botticelli painted them: Venus composed, fully dressed, and radiant. Mars is beside her, naked, slack-jawed, and fast asleep, entirely disarmed. A satyr blows a conch shell in his ear. He doesn't stir. She has exhausted him completely. She is watching the viewer. He is nowhere.
He was tried for murder.
Halirrhothius - son of Poseidon - raped Ares's daughter Alcippe. Ares killed him immediately. Poseidon brought charges. The trial was held on a hill in Athens - the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares. It was the first murder trial in history, mythologically speaking. Ares was acquitted. The hill became Athens's high court, where serious crimes were tried for centuries. The most violent god in the pantheon gave Athens its legal system as a byproduct of killing a rapist.
He is the only major Olympian who never assaulted a woman.
Zeus raped. Poseidon raped. Apollo raped. Hermes raped. Dionysus raped. Ares, the god of bloodlust and carnage, the one all the other gods despised, and the one his own father called most hateful, did not. His affairs were consensual. His children were not produced through violence. The most brutal god in the pantheon had a consistent record of sexual restraint that none of the more civilized Olympians could match.
March is named after him. So is martial law, martial arts, and the word martial itself.
The planet Mars is red because its surface is covered in iron oxide: rust. Iron is his metal. The Roman soldiers who built the largest empire in the ancient world carried iron. When Attila the Hun was advancing across Europe and the western Roman Empire was in its final collapse, a story spread that Attila possessed the Sword of Mars: a weapon that had fallen from the sky, been found by a shepherd whose herd had been injured by it in a field, and delivered to Attila as a sign of divine right to conquer the world. The Romans were more afraid of him because of it.
What Mars actually governs:
The impulse that moves before thinking. The body that acts before the mind has finished processing. Athena handles strategic war, but Mars is raw force, momentum, and the willingness to initiate or cut through. Anger is fuel rather than emotion here. The boundary is enforced through action rather than negotiation. Mars is the capacity to begin: not to plan or sustain, but simply to start. It is the first move. The spear before the shield.
He also governs desire in its most direct form. Not Venus's strategic seduction, not the long game. The immediate move toward what is wanted. The body closing the distance.
The shadow of Mars is not aggression - that is obvious and manageable. The shadow is the cowardice underneath the aggression. Ares fleeing to Olympus when Diomedes stabbed him. The bully who charges mortals from a position of total power but retreats the moment the odds equalize. The force that starts things and cannot finish them. The burn that goes out the moment it meets real resistance.
Mars burns because he has to. Ares burns because he cannot stop. The difference between the two is the difference between directed force and undirected violence - and most people carrying this energy are not always sure which one they are running.