Ares

Ares's affair with Aphrodite, Hephaestus's wife, is sung within the Odyssey itself, by the Phaeacian bard Demodocus at the court of King Alcinous, as entertainment for the shipwrecked Odysseus. Helios, the sun, sees the two together and reports the affair to Hephaestus, who says nothing but goes to his forge with his heart set on revenge. He hammers out a net of chains finer than a spider's web and invisible to the eye, anchors it around his own marriage bed, and hangs its loops from the roof beams above, then announces a journey away from home. Ares comes to Aphrodite as soon as he is gone, and the net drops, binding the pair together too tightly to move. Hephaestus returns and calls the male gods to witness the couple caught in the act, an indignity the poem says the goddesses stayed away from out of modesty. The male gods, however, only laugh, and Apollo turns to Hermes and asks, only half seriously, whether he would accept being bound in such chains himself for the chance to lie beside golden Aphrodite; Hermes answers that he would welcome three times the chains and every god and goddess watching, if only he could have her, an answer that sets off a fresh round of laughter among the gods. Poseidon alone does not laugh, and has to intervene seriously, promising to guarantee payment himself before Hephaestus will loose the net. Freed, Ares flees to Thrace, and Aphrodite withdraws to her own sanctuary at Paphos in Cyprus, where the poem says the Graces bathe her and anoint her with the same fragrant oil the gods themselves wear, restoring the dignity the net had stripped from her. The bard's song closes on the gods still laughing at the god of war caught, for once, unable to fight his way out of anything.

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.