Ares

Every Greek city prayed to him before battle. Almost none of them celebrated him afterward.

Ares is the god of war — son of Zeus and Hera, the Olympian whose domain was the most immediately and the most comprehensively present of all the divine domains in the daily reality of the ancient Greek world, and who was nonetheless regarded with the specific mixture of necessity and discomfort that the Greeks consistently directed toward the thing they consistently did but didn't want to fully acknowledge.

Ares is the interior account of the most misunderstood of the Olympians — not the barbaric and bloodthirsty caricature of the tradition's most dismissive accounts, but the divine being who understood war more completely and more honestly than any other being in the divine or mortal world, who governed the most necessary and the most devastating of the mortal world's most comprehensively practiced activities with the specific honesty that the thing required.

He loved Aphrodite with genuine feeling. He was caught in Hephaestus's net and the gods laughed. He was wounded by Diomedes at Troy. He fled to Zeus. He returned to the fighting. His children were Fear and Terror and Harmony — the most honest mythological accounting of what war most directly produced. He was not Athena, and he did not want to be, and the distinction mattered.

The world needed him. He governed what the world needed. He was not celebrated for it. This is that story.