In the world today, a lot of people base their success and fortune on whether or not they are “popular” or “sought-after”. With Ares, the God of War, that was not the case. He neglected the idea of being liked and admired by others. Of course he was admired by some, but nothing compared to other Gods and Olympians. Maybe Ares was so cold hearted due to the example his father, Zeus, set for him when he was younger. Ares was worried about nothing more than a life full of battles and his lust for bloodshed, whether those battles be with opposing enemies, or even occasionally his own blood relation.
Ares was the son of the king of all gods, Zeus, and the son of the goddess of marriage, Hera (Hatzitsinidou, 1). Ares had many secret lovers that he had relationships with, resulting in many children. He had relationships with over ten different goddesses, and had seven children with Aphrodite and one child with Aglaulus (Hatzitsnidou, 1). Due to his many relationships, Ares was not a favorite among the other gods and Olympians. Many of them envied him and despised him because of his unfaithfulness to one woman (Hatzitsnidou, 1). Ares was also disliked because he sided with the Trojans during the Trojan War, as
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a sign of his love for Aphrodite (The God and Goddess, 1). Hera was jealous of Zeus’ ability to conceive a child in his thigh because of how clean and neat the birth was.
Therefore, Ares was born of an immaculate conception. Hera consumed a magical herb that made this process possible. Since Ares wasn’t brought into the world sexually, Zeus wasn’t technically his biological father, and this caused the relationship between the two of them to be very distant. Ares had an unusual encounter with two giants, known as Aloadai, right after he was born. The Aloadai trapped him in a bronze jar for thirteen months with no intentions of releasing him. As powerful as Zeus was, he could have gotten Ares out of the jar with no struggle at all, but he was oblivious and Hera ended up freeing him (The God and Goddess
1). Ares was often given the nickname of “bloody Ares”, or “raging Ares”, due to his aggressive and truculent behavior (Heritage History, 1). Even though Ares was a god and he lived on Mount Olympus on a throne constructed of human skin, he still wasn’t as respected as the other gods. The other gods and goddesses had many temples built in honor of them while Ares only has a few cults found mainly in Peloponnese and Crete (Gill, 1). When most people think of brother and sister, they think of two people who have each other’s back and two people that love each other. With Ares and Athena, things were a little different. Once during a great war, Ares was fighting against the Greeks and driving them all backwards. When Athena realized what was happening, she rushed to their side to assist them because she did not want them to be defeated by her brother. Ares realized that she was fighting against him and launched a spear at her that she simply knocked away with her shield. Athena responded by flinging a large boulder at Ares’ head, knocking him unconscious. Ares was too injured to continue fighting and he fled to Mount Olympus and the Greeks, with Athena’s assistance, won the war (Heritage History, 1). Ares was most definitely not a favorite among the gods of his time. He was known as someone to pick battles and choose sides of a war based on the simple fact of which side would be the most eventful. He loved battles, no matter who they involved, even if it was with his sister.
In early fifth century BC Greece, the Greeks consistently suffered from the threat of being conquered by the Persian Empire. Between the years 500-479 BC, the Greeks and the Persians fought two wars. Although the Persian power vastly surpassed the Greeks, the Greeks unexpectedly triumphed. In this Goliath versus David scenario, the Greeks as the underdog, defeated the Persians due to their heroic action, divine support, and Greek unity. The threat of the Persian Empire's expansion into Greece and the imminent possibility that they would lose their freedom and become subservient to the Persians, so horrified the Greeks that they united together and risked their lives in order to preserve the one thing they all shared in common, their "Greekness".
Athena’s interesting life started by a very strange birth. When Athena’s mother Metis was impregnated, Athena’s father, Zeus, swallowed her. (2) Soon Zeus had great head pains, so he got Hephaestus to cut open his head with an axe. (5) When he sliced open Zeus’s head, Athena emerged fully grown and with a set of armor on. (2) Even though Zeus had many other children, Athena became his favorite. (8) She had many half brothers and sisters to compete against for this title including Hermes, Hephaestus, Apollo, Ares, Hebe, Artemis, Aphrodite, Persephone, and Tityus. (3)
The Greek and Roman empires were so successful for many reasons. But one of the main reasons was their military powers. Many people think that the military is brutal and has alot of big guns, but its deeper than that. They require advanced weapons, superior strategy, and finally they need leaders to come up with these things. The Greeks came up with these, and then the Romans built upon the Greeks knowledge and fine combed it.
Zeus’ marriages to Demeter, Leto and Hera yield the gods and goddeses familiar to the Greek world, Persephone, Apollo, Artemis, Hebe, Ares and Eileithyia, and he himself eventually bears Athena (912-24). These are not elements of good rule, but simply the gods of the Greek polis. Demeter and Persephone are worshipped for agriculture, Apollo for his oracular shrine, Artemis for the wilderness and young women, Ares for war. Poseidon as sea god is apart from the polis, but he sires the fearsome Triton (931). Likewise, Ares’ children Phobos and Deimos, two aspects of fear, delineate realms beyond the proper bounds of the polis. Maia bears for Zeus Hermes (938-9), who as herald of the gods moves between realms, between one polis and another.
She is the only goddess with an active sexual life. Many others had a couple of children, and suddenly stopped. In order to control her sexual tendencies, Zeus arranged a marriage for Aphrodite. She married her half-brother, Hephaestus, the god of fire and smithy to the gods. This marriage did not work out well, since...
Homers first book was called the Iliad. This dynamic story tells of the struggles that happened in the Trojan War. Although it is fictional, this literary work gives us an insight of how the Greeks thought the world worked. Reading the first five books, there come an understanding of war and how the gobs played a leading role in all of it. This book glorified the Trojan War and follows a Greek warrior named Achilles.
Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, later rose from the sea where Uranus's body had been thrown. Now Cronus became king of the universe. Cronos married his sister, Rhea, and they had six children. At the time of Cronos's marriage to Rhea, Gaea prophesied that one of his children would overthrow Cronos, as he had overthrown Uranus. To protect himself, Cronos swallowed each of his first five children -- Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon -- immediatly after birth.
Many people would blatantly state that the importance of the gods in Greek society derives from the fact that Gods in any society are usually used to explain phenomenon that people cannot logically comprehend, but in ancient Greece gods were actually entities that took part in the workings of society itself. Even simple aspects of day-to-day life such as sex and disputes between mortals were supposedly influenced by godly workings. Unlike modern religions such as Catholicism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, where an omnipotent force supposedly controls the workings of the world, a hierarchy of Gods characterized religion in ancient Greece. Working as one big family, which they actually were, each one of the Greek gods governed a certain aspect of the world in a way that usually reflected their own humanlike personalities. These unique personalities also contained many human flaws such as envy and greed, and were where the Greek God’s importance lay. Greek religion was more concentrated on the way an individual dealt with situations that popped up in the world around him than on understanding the world itself. In other words the Greeks were more interested in the workings of the mind than in the workings of the environment around them.
The tales of Greek heroes and the gods are older than all of us. Most of these tales are thought to be myths, but every interpretation of Greek mythology and the stories that it contains correlates with something in the real world today. The story of the creation of the world, and the stories of the heroes Hercules, Perseus and Theseus, are only but a few of the compelling stories Greek mythology has to offer.
“Greek mythology was used to explain to the world were humans came from and the environment in which humanity lived in”. -(Mark Cartwright). It is explained in a series of myths that feature different gods. Greek Mythology focused on the lives of the gods and through these myths they gave advice on how to live a happy life. These myths were also used to tell people of historical events and a way to keep peole in touch with history and there ancestors. Among these gods was Pallas The Titan God of Warcraft. Pallas was the son of titans Crius ans Eurybia. “Crius was one of the Titans, son of Uranus and Gaea. He married Eurybia, daughter of Pontus
allowed her to have Ares. Zeus really didn't care for Ares, once during infancy Ares had been
As further proof of incest and Zeus's contribution to the image in Greek mythology is the story of Chiron, who was born of a union between Zeus and Ixion, the son of Ares (Sharman-Burke and Greene 33). Ares was the son of Zeus and Hera ...
There are many faces of Ares that you see. The myths have him as some cowardly man that backs out of a fight. The media portrays him as a person that has an ego the size of a beluga whale. You see an aggressive man with no self-control. But that’s not who he truly is.
Throughout the Greek mythology, Zeus has been involved with many women and has faced many resistances from them. Zeus has faced many hurdles not only on his way to become the "king of olympians" but also after that with his relationships with women. Hera, Zeus's last wife , has been directly or indirectly involved in placing most of these hurdles. Of Zeus's seven wives, Hera, also known as Judo, has been the most quarrelsome and mistrustful of her hurband. She was frequently angry and jealous of Zeus's other relationships. In many instances , she has been the source of hurdles in Zeus's relationships with other women.Although described as a sacred marriage, one which was intended to symbolize and promote fertility of crops on earth, since the sky, represented as male, must fertilize the earth through rain in order for life to begin there, thier marriage has never been a smooth one and they have had some bitter fights. In one instance, Zeus hung her out of Olympus with two great weights attached to her feet,and her arms bound by golden chains,as punishment for her having plotted against Hercules.Homer, the author has potrayed the relationship of Zeus and Hera very much like that between a man and a woman. Homer shows how like men and women, even God's lie and decieve and are gullable. In one instance, he shows how , in order to borrow sexual allure from Aphrodite, Hera lies to Aphrodite about going to visit Oceanus and mother Tethys, not telling her original plan of seducing Zeus and making him fall asleep during the war. Then Hera goes to Sleep and asks her for his help and in return of her daughter Pasithea. Since Sleep has always been in love with Pesithea, the greed makes him give in to Hera's request. In this episode, Homer has shown that like humans, greed makes the immortals do things they would not have otherwise done. When Hera finally reaches Olympos, she lies to Zeus too and Zeus gets duped and falls into the trap of her seduction, this episode shows how the king of olympians gets decieved and is not able to foresee Hera's plan.