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6. Ares (Mars).

The usual attendants and servants of Ares are Fear and Terror. By some writers they are described as his sons, yet in Homer they fight against him. There is little to be said of the principal seats of his worship in Greece. In Thebes he was regarded as the god of pestilence; and Aphrodite, who elsewhere appears as the wife of Hephæstus, was given him to wife. By her he became the father of Harmonia, who married Cadmus, and thus became the ancestress of the Cadmean race in Thebes. According to an Athenian local legend, his having slain a son of Poseidon gave rise to the institution of the Areopagus. He was here regarded as the god of vengeance. A celebrated statue by Alcamenes adorned his temple at Athens. Among the warlike people of Sparta the worship of Ares was also extensive.

This deity was regarded with a far greater degree of veneration in Rome, under the appellation of Mars, or Mavors. He seems to have occupied an important position even among the earliest Italian tribes. It was not as god of war, however—for which, amid the peaceful pursuits of cattle-rearing and husbandry, they cared little—but as the god of the spring triumphing over the powers of winter that he was worshipped. It was from his bounty that the primitive people looked for the prosperous growth of their flocks and the fruits of their fields; it was Mars on whom they called for protection against bad weather and destructive pestilence.