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Many people have gotten the impression that, in ancient Greece, Ares was the patron god of Sparta in the same way that Athena was the patron goddess of Athens. This impression, however, is not rooted in any kind of solid historical evidence, but rather solely in the fact that modern people popularly associate Ares and Sparta with many of the same general sorts of things, such as warfare, bloodshed, masculinity, unstoppable fighting abilities, et cetera. To modern observers, Ares seems to embody the Spartan ethos so perfectly that people simply assume without concrete evidence that the Spartans must have adored him. The truth, though, is that Ares was not the patron god of Sparta in any sense. As one of the Twelve Olympians, he was certainly a significant deity in both Athens and Sparta, but, in both poleis, he was still relatively minor compared to other deities who were far more prominent. Indeed, ironically, Athena actually seems to have had a much more developed cult presence in Sparta than Ares. The modern notion that Ares was the patron god of Sparta The claim that Ares was particularly revered in Sparta or even its patron god shows up all over the place on the internet. For instance, the website Villains Wiki has an article titled “Ares” (apparently because the people who write for the Wiki think that Ares is a “villain” in Greek mythology, which isn’t really accurate, but that’s a topic for another day). The current revision of the article includes the following assertion:
This passage is factually inaccurate on several counts, as will become clear over the course of the following sections. Of course, one might expect a wiki site about villains to contain historically dubious assertions, but the claim that Ares was particularly revered in Sparta also shows up on some websites that someone might expect to be more reliable. Notably, the World History Encyclopedia’s article “Ares,” written by Mark Cartwright, who has an MA in political philosophy, claims:
With so many websites claiming that Ares was an especially important god in Sparta, it’s no surprise that many people are confused. There are many questions on Quora that are either based on the assumption that Ares was indeed the patron god of Sparta or asking for clarification about whether he was the patron god of Sparta. Here are some examples:
These are just a few examples. Now, as it happens, none of the claims I have quoted above are rooted in any kind of historical evidence. On the contrary, the historical evidence indicates that, although Ares was worshipped in Sparta, he was not a particularly important deity there. ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Ares Borghese, a Roman marble statue of the god Ares dating to the first or second century CE, possibly based on an earlier Greek statue, now held in the Louvre Museum Ares in the Greek world Before I talk about Ares in Sparta specifically, it is worth discussing how he is generally portrayed in ancient Greek sources. Across a wide range of ancient sources spanning many different Greek cultures over the course of many centuries, he is nearly always portrayed in a very negative light. The Greeks associated him with bloodlust, indiscriminate violence, and carnage—all things that they generally viewed as negative. The Homeric epics often mention Ares in figurative speech about the devastation of war. For instance, the Iliad 3.125–128 describes the goddess Iris finding Helene of Troy weaving a tapestry at her loom depicting the battles of the Trojans and the Achaians. Here is the description in Greek:
This means, in my own translation:
Just a few lines later, in Iliad 3.131, Iris says to Helene that the Trojans and the Achaians are “ἐπ᾽ ἀλλήλοισι φέρον πολύδακρυν Ἄρηα” (“bearing against each other much-tearful Ares”), using Ares’s name as a metonymy for destructive war itself. ABOVE: Illustration by the British artist John Flaxman (lived 1755 – 1826) depicting Iris addressing Helene as described in the Iliad The Homeric epics also characterize Ares himself distinctly negatively, routinely describing him using negative epithets. For instance, in the Iliad 5.31, Athena addresses Ares, calling him “Ἆρες Ἄρες βροτολοιγὲ μιαιφόνε τειχεσιπλῆτα” (“Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, blood-stained stormer of walls”). Even Ares’s capabilities as a warrior are somewhat open to question. As I discuss at length in this article I wrote in April 2019, it seems like nearly all the best-known myths in which Ares appears involve someone getting the better of him in some manner. In the Iliad 5.385–391, Zeus tells Aphrodite about how the giants Otos and Ephialtes once captured Ares, wrapped him in chains, and trapped him in a jar for thirteen months until Hermes came along and rescued him. Later, in that same book of the Iliad, the mortal Achaian hero Diomedes manages to wound Ares. Then, of course, Ares’s most famous appearance in the Homeric epics by far is in the Odyssey 8.266–366, where the god Hephaistos catches him in a golden net while he is having illicit sex with Aphrodite (who, in the Odyssey, is portrayed as Hephaistos’s wife) and makes a fool of him by inviting all the gods to come and laugh at him. Of course, I think that this portrayal of Ares getting constantly beaten is at least partly a result of the so-called “Worf effect,” a storytelling trope that has received its modern name from the Star Trek character Worf, son of Mogh, who is a famous example of it. This trope occurs when a storyteller tries to show that a character is really powerful or skilled at fighting by having them beat a character who has already been established as extremely powerful or skilled at fighting. They then do this so often that the character who is supposedly extremely powerful or skilled starts to look weak because they keep getting beat up. Nonetheless, I suspect that ancient Greek people also liked telling and hearing stories about Ares getting beat up, because they didn’t like Ares and so they were always rooting against him. ABOVE: Mars and Venus Surprised by the Gods, painted between c. 1606 and c. 1610 by the Dutch Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael It should hardly be surprising that even Ares’s own father Zeus has nothing but scorn for him. In the Iliad, Book Five, after Ares is wounded by Diomedes, he goes to Zeus to whine about being injured. Zeus responds by saying this to him in the Iliad 5.889–891:
This means, in my own translation:
Given this portrayal in Greek literature, it should come as little surprise that Ares was never very widely worshipped in the ancient Greek world. In fact, of the Twelve Olympians, he was probably the least important to actual Greek religious practice. In this, he again stands in contrast to Athena, who was one of the most widely worshipped and respected deities in the Greek pantheon. Even Hestia, who barely appears in any Greek myths, was far more important to actual Greek religious practice than Ares. Ares was rarely invoked for any reason, he never held any temple or shrine of Panhellenic significance, and the only Greek polis that is ever known to have regarded him as its patron deity was Metropolis in Ionia (kudos to Johannes Walter on Quora for bringing this one to my attention). Most Greek poleis had a minor sanctuary to Ares of some kind someplace, but it was rarely anything hugely important or impressive, nor was it usually cared for by any large staff of priests or priestesses. This is probably because, to a large extent, ancient Greek religion was about bargaining with the deities. People would make offerings or promises of offerings to the deities in hope that they would give them things that they wanted in return. Ares, though, was rarely a god whom people felt they could trust to bargain with. Thus, in general, people tried to appease Ares and keep him from unleashing his fury against them, but they generally regarded him as a god to be kept at bay. ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic black-figure volute-krater by the Nikosthenes Potter dating to between c. 540 and c. 510 BCE, depicting Zeus trying to break up a fight between Athena (on the left) and Ares (on the right) Menelaos’s epithet ἀρηίφιλος Everything I’ve said so far has been about Ares in Greek mythology and religion in general. Now I will say a few words about his cult in Sparta in particular. Someone could argue that Ares is associated with Sparta in the Homeric epics, albeit in a very indirect way. In the epics, Menelaos, the mythical king of Sparta, is frequently given the epithet ἀρηίφιλος (arēíphilos), which can be variously translated as “Ares-beloved,” “dear to Ares,” or “friend of Ares.” To give you a sense of how often this epithet is repeated, here are all the instances where it occurs in books two and three of the Iliad alone: 2.778, 3.21, 3.52, 3.69, 3.90, 3.136, 3.206, 3.232, 3.253, 3.307, 3.430, 3.432, 3.452, and 3.457. This epithet, however, only indicates that Menelaos was thought to have a special connection to Ares, not Sparta itself. We should not under any circumstances assume that what is said about Menelaos can be applied in any way to Spartan people more generally. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed before that people have tendency to make this assumption. Notably, the fact that Menelaos is described in the Iliad as ξανθός (xanthós), which means “tawny” and is often translated as “blond” has helped fuel the misconception, which is popular among white supremacists and Neo-Nazis, that the ancient Spartans in general were known for having a higher prevalence of blond hair than other Greeks. (I debunk this misconception at length in this article I wrote in May 2020.) ABOVE: Detail of a Roman fresco from the atrium of the House of Menander in Pompeii depicting Menelaos seizing a semi-naked Helene of Troy by her hair during the sack of Troy Apollodoros’s dubious claim of Spartans performing human sacrifices to Ares Leaving dubious speculations based on Homeric epithets aside, nearly all of what is known about the actual cult of Ares in Sparta comes from extremely late sources written during the Hellenistic period or even the Roman period. The Greek writer Apollodoros of Athens, who lived in the late second century BCE, claims in a fragment (Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historike, 244 F 125), which has been preserved through summary by the later Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyrios of Tyre (lived c. 234 – c. 305 CE) in his treatise On Abstinence from Killing Animals 2.55, that the Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares. Porphyrios’s summary of Apollodoros occurs in the midst of an account of various peoples that have supposedly practiced human sacrifice. On this list, he includes the Spartans, writing as follows, as translated by Thomas Taylor (with Greek names and spellings restored):
This one very brief sentence is all that Porphyrios says on the subject, but the claim he makes here has become widely repeated online. Historically speaking, it is unlikely that the Spartans really performed human sacrifices to Ares, for three reasons. First, there is no surviving mention of this supposed practice in any ancient source before Apollodoros, despite the fact that rumors of Greeks performing human sacrifices in other contexts are discussed in Classical Greek sources. Second, Apollodoros was writing very late, at a time when Sparta was no longer the independent polis that it had once been and legends about what Spartan customs had been like in their heyday were starting to accumulate. Third and finally, Apollodoros was an Athenian, so he may have been hostile to the Spartans on account of the Athenians and the Spartans’ age-old rivalry and therefore willing to report hostile rumors without credible evidence to support them. ABOVE: Medieval manuscript illustration of a debate between the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd and the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyrios of Tyre, who preserves the fragment from Apollodoros claiming that the Spartans offered human sacrifices to Ares Pausanias’s account of the cult of Ares in Sparta The later Greek travel writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE), who flourished at a time when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire, claims in his Guide to Greece 3.14.10 that Spartan youths ritually sacrificed puppies at night to the god Enyalios, who was often equated with Ares, at a place outside the city called Phoibaion. This account is more believable than that of Apollodoros, especially since Pausanias makes it sound like this tradition was still followed in Sparta in his own time. He writes, as translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod:
Pausanias later mentions in his Guide to Greece 3.15.7 that, in Sparta, there was a very ancient cult statue of Enyalios bound in chains. He claims that the chains were meant to keep the god from running away and leaving the city. He writes, in Jones and Ormerod’s translation:
Finally, Pausanias records in his Guide to Greece 3.19.7–8 that there was a small ancient sanctuary of Ares under his own name along a road in Lakonia outside the city of Sparta proper. He says that this sanctuary contained a cult statue that Kastor and Polydeukes—the divine twin half-brothers who were said to be the sons of the mythical Spartan queen Leda and were known as the Dioskouroi or “youths of Zeus”—were said to have taken from the land of Kolchis along the Black Sea. Pausanias writes, in Jones and Ormerod’s translation:
This concludes our examination of the evidence for the cult of Ares in Sparta. As you can see, the evidence is fairly minimal. His cult seems to have been, at best, pretty standard fare for an Olympian deity in any major Greek city. It’s certainly nothing compared to, say, the cult of Athena in Athens. The Athenians regarded Athena as their special patron and protector more than any of the other deities. They put Athena’s face on most of their coinage and built multiple major temples to her in their city, including, most famously, the Parthenon, which stands atop the Athenian Akropolis. (For the history of how the Parthenon became so famous, see this article I wrote a little over a week ago, exploring this question.) The Spartans, by contrast, didn’t have a major temple to Ares on their Akropolis and certainly never seem to have regarded Ares as their special patron. ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Athenian silver coin dating to between c. 510 and c 490 BCE, depicting the helmeted head of Athena in profile on the obverse and an owl with an olive branch and the letters ΑΘΕ (short for the archaic Attic spelling of the name Ἀθῆναι) on the reverse Reasons why the Spartans might not have especially cared for Ares Some people may be wondering why Ares was not more important to Spartan religion than he was historically. Sadly, it is impossible to give any kind of definitive answer to this question. Nonetheless, I think it may be helpful to point out some noteworthy discrepancies between how Ares is portrayed in Greek mythological sources and how the surviving ancient Greek sources characterize the Spartan ethos. The ancient Greek sources portray the Spartans as placing tremendous importance on the values of εὐνομία (eunomía), meaning “good law” or “good governance,” and σωφροσύνη (sōphrosýnē), meaning “restraint” or “moderation.” For the Spartans, following εὐνομία meant having good laws and obeying them. As part of this, it was expected for all soldiers to follow all orders at all times. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his Histories 7.228.2 that the Spartans set up a two-line poetic epitaph at Thermopylai to commemorate the Spartans who died in the battle there in summer 480 BCE during the invasion of Greece by the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Xerxes I. He quotes the poem as follows:
This means, in my own translation:
Notice how the primary emphasis here is not on the Spartans’ bravery or their fighting prowess, but rather on their obedience. This is one way in which Ares goes totally against everything the Spartans stood for, since a defining aspect of Ares’s personality is that he does not follow orders given to him by anyone. He is instead associated with raw, untamable bloodlust. Zeus literally describes him in that passage from the Iliad I quoted earlier as “capricious” and “ungovernable.” ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the modern epitaph at Thermopylai bearing the text of the poem quoted by Herodotos (The original ancient epitaph has not survived.) Meanwhile, for the Spartans, following σωφροσύνη necessarily entailed always acting with thoughtful consideration, since they thought that acting rashly or out of passion would be likely to result in immoderate or excessive outcomes. Allow me to illustrate with an example. The Athenian historian and general Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE) gives a very famous description of the first council of Sparta and its allies before the Peloponnesian War in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.66–88. First, Thoukydides records the speech (1.68–71) that was supposedly given by the Corinthians, who were allies of Sparta, in which they actually accuse the Spartans of being too moderate and too restrained in their foreign policy, claiming that Spartan hesitation and refusal to intervene has allowed Athens to grow too powerful. The Corinthians therefore urge the Spartans to declare war against the Athenians. Next, Thoukydides describes the speech given by an anonymous Athenian emissary who he says happened to be present at the meeting (1.72–78), in which the emissary very brazenly and undiplomatically asserts that Athens is strong, that it is the natural order for the strong to rule over the weak, and that Athens will stand up for its interests with military force if necessary. After this, Thoukydides recounts the supposed speech (1.79–85) of the elderly and highly respected Spartan king Archidamos, in which he carefully warns the Spartans not to declare war rashly, since war brings great suffering and devastation. Finally, Thoukydides records the very short speech (1.86) supposedly given by Sthenelaidas, one of the Spartan ephors, in which he urges the Spartans to declare war to prevent Athens from growing further in power and to protect Sparta’s allies. As I discuss in this article I wrote back in November 2021 about Thoukydides’s accuracy, the speeches he gives in his history are certainly not verbally accurate reports of what anybody really said, but, in some cases, they may be based on what information Thoukydides had available to him about what was really said. Additionally, even in cases where Thoukydides has completely made the speeches up, he certainly made them up in keeping with what he knew about the general character of the people he was writing about. The Spartans’ reputation as cautious and hesitant to go to war is documented in other historical sources, which suggests that there is probably some truth to it. Given this reputation of the Spartans, it makes sense that they might find Ares, whose infamous rashness and tendency to barge into situations without caution are defining character traits, not an especially appealing god to worship. ABOVE: Third-century CE Roman mosaic of the ancient Athenian historian Thoukydides, based on traditional iconography Major deities who were worshipped in Sparta Now that we’ve talked about Ares, a god who was relatively unimportant in Sparta, I think I should probably talk about some of the deities who were very important in Sparta. Sparta didn’t have a single patron deity in the same manner as Athens, but some deities were still considered especially important there—particularly Zeus, Athena, Apollon, Artemis, and the Dioskouroi. The following overview of the major deities in Sparta relies in part on Nicolas Richer’s chapter “The Religious System at Sparta” (pp. 236–252) in A Companion to Greek Religion, edited by Daniel Ogden and published in 2007 by Blackwell Publishing. There are, however, certainly many other scholarly resources out there about Spartan religion. I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning. Possibly the oldest surviving written source from ancient Sparta is the Great Rhetra, a political text written in obscure, archaic Greek, probably sometime around 700 BCE or thereabouts, that is preserved through quotation by the Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) in his biography The Life of Lykourgos 6.2 and 8. The very beginning of the Great Rhetra references “the foundation of a sanctuary of Zeus Skyllanios and Athena Skyllania.” Later, the text references the Apellai, a festival of the god Apollon. It therefore attests the importance of the worship of Zeus, Athena, and Apollon in early Sparta. Apollon and Artemis In later times, which are much better historically attested, the most important Spartan religious festivals were probably the Karneia, the Hyakinthia, and the Gymnopaidia, all of which were dedicated to Apollon. Apollon’s tremendous importance to the ancient Spartans is further underscored by the fact that, according to a legend first recorded by Herodotos in his Histories 1.65, the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos supposedly radically reformed Spartan society and the Spartan constitution at the behest of the oracle of Apollon at Delphoi. Thus, according to the legend, the Spartan constitution and the laws that governed Spartan society actually came from Apollon himself. Although this legend is almost certainly apocryphal, it was widely believed in antiquity. Meanwhile, probably the most important temple in ancient Sparta was the temple of the goddess known by the epithet Ὀρθία (Orthía), who was widely identified as an aspect of Apollon’s twin sister Artemis. The sheer importance that Orthia’s temple held is evidenced by the fact that archaeologists have found over 100,000 lead votive figurines dedicated there to the goddess, depicting various figures, including a female figure with wings (who may be the goddess Orthia herself), soldiers in armor with weapons, and various animals. ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the ruins of the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta, taken in May 2019 ABOVE: Photograph from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website showing one example of a lead figurine from the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta, dating to the late seventh or sixth century BCE, depicting a winged female figure, possibly Orthia herself The Spartans also held an annual festival in honor of Orthia. The Athenian historian Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) claims in his treatise On the Constitution of the Lakedaimonians or On Spartan Society 2.7–9 that the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos encouraged Spartan boys to steal food, but he says that Lykourgos ordered the boys who were caught stealing to be whipped for being incompetent thieves. He also says that there was an event, which probably took place during the festival of Orthia, in which cheeses would be piled on Orthia’s altars, guarded by people with whips, and the Spartan boys would try to sneak by and steal the cheeses without getting caught and whipped. As I discuss in this article I wrote about fun facts about ancient Sparta in January 2021, in much later times, the Spartans developed a rather shocking and spectacular ritual, which is first attested in the first century BCE. During the festival of Orthia, in front of a large crowd, they would whip local adolescent boys (who were most likely volunteers) on the altars of Orthia until their backs were covered in blood. The boys, in turn, would show no visible sign of pain whatsoever, proving to the astonished onlookers how manly they were and immune to pain. The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BCE) personally visited Sparta and saw the flagellation of the Spartan boys on the altars of Orthia. He describes the experience, writing in his Tusculan Disputations 5.14, as translated by C. D. Yonge:
The ritual evidently made quite the impression on him, because he describes it again in his Tusculan Disputations 5.27, writing, in Yonge’s translation:
As late as the fourth century CE, the Spartans still seem to have practiced this whipping ritual annually, attracting tourists from all over the Roman Empire. ABOVE: Illustration of the infamous Spartan whipping ritual from the 1911 novel The Coward of Thermopylae by Caroline Dale Snedeker Athena Ironically, contrary to popular perception, Athena seems to have had a much more developed cultic presence in Sparta than Ares. While Ares apparently only had what seems to have been a fairly small, minor sanctuary outside the city of Sparta itself, there was a major temple to Athena located on the Spartan Akropolis. Pausanias records in his Guide to Greece 3.17.2 that this temple was dedicated to her under her epithets Χαλκίοικος (Chalkíoikos), meaning “Bronze-Housed,” and Πολιοῦχος (Polioûchos), meaning “City Protector.” The ruins of this temple still exist today and have been excavated. They admittedly don’t look especially impressive; the Parthenon in Athens is certainly far more imposing. Nonetheless, this temple seems to have been a very important one for the ancient Spartans. ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the ruins of the Temple of Athena Chalkioikos on the Spartan Akropolis, taken in April 2018 The Dioskouroi Finally, the last set of deities who were especially revered in Sparta were Kastor and Polydeukes, who, as I have already mentioned, were known together as the Dioskouroi or the Tyndaridai. The oldest attested tradition of their parentage, which is found in the Odyssey 11.298–304, holds that they were both sons of the Spartan king Tyndareus. The more famous tradition, though, which first attested by the Theban poet Pindaros (lived c. 518 – 438 BCE) in his “Tenth Nemean Ode,” holds that the Dioskouroi were born as twins of the same mother, Leda, but Kastor was the son of Tyndareus and Polydeukes was the son of Zeus. According to Pindaros’s version of the story, a man named Idas killed Kastor in a fight over cattle and Polydeukes chose to share his immortality with his brother so that they would trade places each day, with one of them living on Mount Olympos among the deities while the other stayed in the Underworld. In any case, the Spartans regarded the Dioskouroi as protectors of the army. They represented the twin brothers using an aniconic symbol known as the δόκανα (dókana), which took the form of two upright poles with a cross-bar linking them. There are numerous surviving examples of this symbol and Ploutarchos of Chaironeia explains its symbolism in his treatise On Fraternal Love 1 (= Moralia 478a–b). Thus, clearly, there were many deities who were especially important to the Spartans—but Ares was not one of them. ABOVE: Sketch of a dokana, from Nicolas Richer’s chapter “The Religious System at Sparta,” page 240 |
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