A God Almost Without an Altar: Ares's Meager Cult

Ares is one of the rare Olympians whose entity record on this atlas carries no principal cult centre fact at all, and that absence is not an oversight in the data, it reflects the ancient record itself. Scholarship on Greek religion is consistent that Ares had very few temples and shrines anywhere in Greece and correspondingly few cults devoted to him, a contrast made sharper by his later Roman counterpart Mars, who held one of the most central places in Roman state religion, protector, father figure and moral guide to the city, with major temples including Augustus's Mars Ultor in the heart of Rome itself. Greek religion never extended Ares anything like that civic weight; the Greeks associated him with war's cruelty and chaos rather than its discipline and strategy, the quality Athena embodied instead, and Homer has Zeus call his own son the most hateful god on Olympus. So Ares carries a double absence rather than a single one. Where most of the Greek pantheon can be said to have once had a real, substantial cult that simply has no continuous modern practice, Ares's ancient worship was itself already marginal, and what little existed ended in the same collapse of Greek temple religion that ended every other Olympian's cult.