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 despised him. Athena defeated him twice in open combat. The mortal Diomedes 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. The Athenians, who preferred Athena for war — strategy, discipline, the kind of war you could win — wrote Ares as a psychotic brute and a coward simultaneously. The Spartans worshipped him and even they acknowledged he was barely controllable. The only Olympians consistently fond of him were Aphrodite, his lover, and Hades, who appreciated the steady supply of dead.
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. The Romans called themselves the sons of Mars. They built him temples, named a month after him, named the primary military training ground of the entire empire after him: the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars, still a neighborhood in Rome today.
He was not just war. He was spring. March 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 protector of cattle, guardian of agriculture, defender of borders, father of the city. He was loved because Rome was built on blood and they didn't pretend otherwise.
His children with Aphrodite were Eros, Harmonia, Phobos, and Deimos.
Desire, Harmony, Fear, and Dread. Botticelli painted them: Venus composed, fully dressed, and radiant. Mars 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, 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.
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, a story spread that he possessed the Sword of Mars — a weapon that had fallen from the sky. The Romans were more afraid of him because of it.
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.
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.
Mars burns because he has to. Ares burns because he cannot stop.