The Greek war-god as Greeks themselves treated him: a force more cursed than honored. Homer's Zeus calls him the most hateful of the gods. Cult presence narrow — most prominent at Sparta (where his statue was kept chained) and at Thebes (via the Cadmus-Harmonia line). Distinct from his Roman interpretatio Mars, who was the begetter of Romulus and central to Roman civic identity in a way Ares never was at Athens.