Gods of war across cultures: which ones really match Ares

The short answer

Two war gods outside Greece have early evidence of a match with Ares: Mars, whom Romans identified with Ares, and Týr, whom Latin sources equate with Mars. Three more matches rest on reference pages, for Bellona, Montu and Anhur. The other six gods in the table below are war gods in their own traditions, but none of the pages read for this article ties them to Ares.

A better comparison sorts gods by what kind of war they stand for. Ares is the brutal side of war. Mars secures the state, Montu embodies the pharaoh as conqueror, Týr presides over victory and the legal assembly, Ninurta fights as a farming god, Inanna mixes war with love, and Huitzilopochtli is a sun god fed with blood. Those are different jobs, and the table keeps them apart.

The Greek baseline: Ares and Athena

Ares is the Greek god of war and courage, one who embodies the physical valor needed for victory but can also personify brutality and bloodlust. His sister Athena represents military strategy. Athena led soldiers into battle as Athena Promachos, was thought to back only those fighting for a just cause, and favored cunning and intelligence over brute strength. It also says the Greeks held Athena in much higher esteem than Ares and describes him as being of foreign origin in Homer's account.

Greek feeling about Ares was mixed. In the Iliad Zeus calls him the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympus. Formal temples and cult were rare on the mainland and in the Peloponnese, with an altar at Olympia and a temple later moved to the Athenian agora as the page's examples. The entry also notes that Ares was sometimes identified with Enyalios and sometimes treated as a separate war god, and that he was an oracular deity in parts of Asia Minor. Any match to Ares therefore has to say which Greek war god it means: the violent one or the strategic one.

War gods across cultures

Each row gives the tradition, the god, the kind of war the god stands for, and what the reference pages record about a match to Ares or Mars. The marks are explained near the end of the article.

Where the matches hold and where they fail

Mars and Ares

Mars was both a god of war and an agricultural guardian, a combination it calls characteristic of early Rome. His festivals cluster in March and October, the months that opened and closed the campaigning and farming seasons. The Salii, twelve patrician youths, danced the sacred shields through the city in March, and the page says their leaping was meant to speed crop growth. On October 15 Rome held its only known horse sacrifice, tied to the close of the campaigning season.

Mars ranked far above Ares in state religion. His high priest, the Flamen Martialis, was one of three major priests in the college of flamens, and Mars sat in the Capitoline Triad with Jupiter and Quirinus. He was father of Romulus and Remus and, in the page's words, a father of the Roman people. Augustus built the Temple of Mars Ultor in his forum, and on imperial holidays Mars Ultor received the first sacrifice. The entry sums up the difference this way: Ares was seen mainly as destructive and destabilizing, while Mars was tied to securing peace and to the Roman state. The match is old and documented, and the characters still differ.

Bellona

Bellona comes closer to Ares in temperament. She embodies the destructive and brutal side of warfare and is shown with a helmet, weapons, a torch or whip and a four-horse chariot. Her temple in Rome was dedicated in 296 BCE by Appius Claudius Caecus during the war with the Etruscans and Samnites. It stood outside the pomerium, so generals holding imperium could meet senators there. A fetial priest declared war by throwing a javelin over the war column toward enemy land, and one historian suggests Bellona may have overseen the process. She is equated with Enyo, the Greek war goddess, and with Nerio, the consort of Mars.

Týr

Týr is covered in detail on the page about Greek and Norse gods. In short, Latin sources equate him with Mars, the Housesteads altar of the 3rd century names Mars Thincsus, and Tuesday derives from Latin Martis dies. His war is tied to the thing, the Germanic legal assembly, and Gylfaginning says he has great power over victory in battles and is now considered a promoter of settlements between people.

Montu, Anhur and Sekhmet

Egypt has three war deities and only two Greek matches. Montu is a falcon-god of war and an embodiment of the conquering strength of the pharaoh, worshipped especially in Upper Egypt and around Thebes. He began as a manifestation of the scorching power of Ra. The 11th Dynasty, dated on the page to c. 2134 to 1991 BC, adopted him as a protective and dynastic deity, and the page says he was supreme in the Middle Kingdom before Amun surpassed him. Thutmose III was called a Valiant Montu on the Battlefield, and Ramesses II was said to have raged at the enemy like Montu, Lord of Thebes. The Greeks paired him with Ares, though he was also linked with Apollo.

The Onuris entry calls Anhur a war god worshipped mainly at Abydos and Thinis, with the title slayer of enemies. It says the Greeks identified him with Ares. His name means roughly he who leads back the distant one, after the myth in which he brought his wife Mehit from Nubia. Sekhmet is the odd one out.

The entry describes a lioness-headed warrior goddess who embodied the vengeful power of Ra: in one myth she nearly destroys mortals until the gods pour out beer dyed red, she drinks until she is drunk, and she stops. She also causes plagues and is invoked to heal the sick. The only Greek note on the page is a claim marked as needing a citation, so she carries no match here.

Ninurta and Inanna

Mesopotamia has two war deities with unlike natures. Ninurta was first an agricultural and healing god and became a warrior as Mesopotamia grew more militarized, keeping his farming symbols of a plow and a perched bird. In the Sumerian epic Lugal-e he defeats the demon Asag with his talking mace Sharur and uses the stones of the defeated warriors to build mountains that direct water into the Tigris and Euphrates. In an Akkadian myth he is sent to recover the Tablet of Destinies from the bird Anzû. Assyrian kings put his name in their own, and Ashurnasirpal II built his first temple at Kalhu. The entry does not mention Ares, and the Greek equivalents it lists are Cronus and Saturn.

Inanna, or Ishtar, fills a different slot. She was worshipped as the goddess of both warfare and love, and cites hymns in which she stirs confusion and carnage against those who defy her. Epithets such as Anunitu, the martial one, and an Akkadian-period image of a heavily armed goddess with a lion support the war reading. Aphrodite is the Greek equivalent the page lists, not Ares, and it says the Phoenician Astarte possibly influenced the development of Aphrodite.

The Morrígan

Morrígan is an Irish figure mainly linked with war and fate, appearing as a crow and washing the bloodstained clothes of those fated to die. The entry also shows how much of the war image rests on one interpretation. It says her war-goddess image rests largely on W. M. Hennessy's 1870 work, her earliest sources are brief glosses and glossaries, and Herbert argues that war per se is not a primary aspect of her role. Scholars such as Herbert and Mac Cana read her role as more tutelary than purely martial. A war god label for her is a modern choice, and the evidence behind it is thin.

Indra

Indra is the Vedic god of weather, sky, lightning, thunder, storms, rain and war, and the most frequently mentioned deity in the Rigveda, the sole dedicatee of about 250 hymns according to the page. His best-known act is killing the serpent Vritra with his vajra, which releases rain and rivers. The entry compares him to Zeus, Jupiter and Thor as thunder gods who act as kings of the gods, and it does not mention Ares. It also cautions that Vedic thought does not consistently subordinate other gods to him. Hindu tradition treats these texts as sacred, and this page describes the Vedic figure only as the page does.

Huitzilopochtli

Huitzilopochtli is the solar and war deity of sacrifice in Aztec religion and the patron god of the Mexica and of Tenochtitlan. In the birth myth he emerges fully armed from his mother Coatlicue, beheads his sister Coyolxauhqui and chases his brothers across the sky: he is the sun, his brothers the stars and his sister the moon. The Aztecs believed he needed daily nourishment of blood and hearts, and warriors who died in battle or as sacrifices were called quauhteca. His war is cosmic and ritual, fought in the sky and renewed by sacrifice. The entry makes no comparison to Mars or Ares, so none is claimed here.

What the strength marks mean

On this page the mark rates the match to Ares or Mars. Attested means a named early writer or an inscription makes it: Roman identification of Mars with Ares, and the Latin sources and the Housesteads altar for Týr. Scholarly means a reference page records the match without an early source, as it does for Bellona, Montu and Anhur. Popular claim means no page read for this article records a match to Ares, though a god can still be a war god in his or her own tradition.

The reference pages are secondary sources. The Iliad, the Eddas and the Vedic hymns were read only through those pages, and Britannica was not used on this page. The Morrígan entry itself says its war reading is an interpretation, which is why that row is marked as it is.