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91-466: The Bistones were militant people who worshiped Ares , Dionysus or Bacchus , Minerva , and Bellona. In the play Alcestis by Euripides , the mythical Heracles is on his way to the land of the Bistones in his labour for Tirynthian Eurystheus to fetch the chariot-steeds of Thracian Diomedes . The Thracian Diomedes was king of the Bistones. The Argonautica (line 78) implies Orpheus

182-557: A rooster which now always announces the arrival of the sun in the morning, as a way of apologizing to Ares. The Chorus of Aeschylus ' Suppliants (written 463 BC) refers to Ares as Aphrodite's "mortal-destroying bedfellow". In the Illiad , Ares helps the Trojans because of his affection for their divine protector, Aphrodite; she thus redirects his innate destructive savagery to her own purposes. In one archaic myth, related only in

273-577: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,

364-534: A bird of evil omen and Ares and Hermes fulfilled her wish by choosing the woodpecker for her, a good omen for hunters. Sometimes poets and dramatists recounted ancient traditions, which varied, and sometimes they invented new details; later scholiasts might draw on either or simply guess. Thus while Phobos and Deimos were regularly described as offspring of Ares, others listed here such as Meleager , Sinope and Solymus were sometimes said to be children of Ares and sometimes given other fathers. The following

455-481: A coastal island in the Black Sea . Ares plays a central role in the founding myth of Thebes , as the progenitor of the water-dragon slain by Cadmus . The dragon's teeth were sown into the ground as if a crop and sprang up as the fully armored autochthonic Spartoi . Cadmus placed himself in the god's service for eight years to atone for killing the dragon. To further propitiate Ares, Cadmus married Harmonia ,

546-401: A daughter of Ares's union with Aphrodite. In this way, Cadmus harmonized all strife and founded the city of Thebes. In reality, Thebes came to dominate Boeotia 's great and fertile plain, which in both history and myth was a battleground for competing polities. According to Plutarch, the plain was anciently described as "The dancing-floor of Ares". In Homer's Odyssey , in the tale sung by

637-558: A fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes , a limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in

728-560: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on

819-540: A foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near

910-454: A form of Hestia ), Api and Papaios in Scythia's divine hierarchy. His cult object was an iron sword. The "Scythian Ares" was offered blood-sacrifices (or ritual killings) of cattle, horses and "one in every hundred human war-captives", whose blood was used to douse the sword. Statues, and complex platform-altars made of heaped brushwood were devoted to him. This sword-cult, or one very similar,

1001-573: A limited role in Greek mythology . When he does appear, he is often humiliated. In the Trojan War , Aphrodite , protector of Troy, persuades Ares to take the Trojans' side. The Trojans lose, while Ares' sister Athena helps the Greeks to victory. Most famously, when the craftsman-god Hephaestus discovers his wife Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares, he traps the lovers in a net and exposes them to

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1092-403: A much later interpolated detail, Ares put the young soldier Alectryon , who was Ares companion in drinking and even love-making, by his door to warn them of Helios's arrival as Helios would tell Hephaestus of Aphrodite's infidelity if the two were discovered, but Alectryon fell asleep on guard duty. Helios discovered the two and alerted Hephaestus. The furious Ares turned the sleepy Alectryon into

1183-550: A peaceful deity for you, once he has driven the enemy horde far from your country, and he will give rise to prosperity much prayed for." This Ares karpodotes ("giver of Fruits") is well attested in Lycia and Pisidia. Like most Greek deities, Ares was given animal sacrifice; in Sparta, after battle, he was given an ox for a victory by stratagem, or a rooster for victory through onslaught. The usual recipient of sacrifice before battle

1274-627: A puppy to Enyalios before engaging in a hand-to-hand "fight without rules" at the Phoebaeum. The chthonic night-time sacrifice of a dog to Enyalios became assimilated to the cult of Ares. Porphyry claims, without detail, that Apollodorus of Athens (circa second century BC) says the Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares, but this may be a reference to mythic pre-history. A Thracian god identified by Herodotus ( c.  484 – c.  425 BC ) as Ares, through interpretatio Graeca ,

1365-459: A savage, dangerous, or militarized quality; but when Ares does appear in myths, he typically faces humiliation. In the Iliad, Zeus expresses a recurring Greek revulsion toward the god when Ares returns wounded and complaining from the battlefield at Troy : Then looking at him darkly Zeus who gathers the clouds spoke to him: "Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar. To me you are

1456-411: A thunderbolt. Ares had a romantic liaison with Eos , the goddess of the dawn . Aphrodite discovered them, and in anger she cursed Eos with insatiable lust for men. By a woman named Teirene he had a daughter named Thrassa , who in turn had a daughter named Polyphonte . Polyphonte was cursed by Aphrodite to love and mate with a bear, producing two sons, Agrius and Oreius , who were hubristic toward

1547-550: A warlike Aphrodite, on the Spartan acropolis. Gonzalez observes, in his 2005 survey of Ares' cults in Asia Minor, that cults to Ares on the Greek mainland may have been more common than some sources assert. Wars between Greek states were endemic; war and warriors provided Ares's tribute, and fed his insatiable appetite for battle. Ares' attributes are instruments of war: a helmet, shield, and sword or spear. Libanius "makes

1638-473: Is a list of Ares' offspring, by various mothers. Beside each offspring, the earliest source to record the parentage is given, along with the century to which the source dates. The nearest counterpart of Ares among the Roman gods is Mars , a son of Jupiter and Juno , pre-eminent among the Roman army's military gods but originally an agricultural deity. As a father of Romulus , Rome's legendary founder, Mars

1729-804: Is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout

1820-717: Is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of the Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system

1911-479: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During

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2002-508: Is king of Bistonian Pieria , succeeding his mortal father, King Oeagrus . Orpheus is also said to have been killed by Bistonian women. From the worship of Bacchus (Dionysus) in Thrace, Bacchic women are called Bistonides . Similarly, in some Latin poems, Edonis are Bacchic women from the Thracian tribe Edoni . Some traditions state that Phineus was killed by Boreas , or that he

2093-591: Is one of the Twelve Olympians , and the son of Zeus and Hera . The Greeks were ambivalent towards him. He embodies the physical valor necessary for success in war but can also personify sheer brutality and bloodlust, in contrast to his sister Athena , whose martial functions include military strategy and generalship. An association with Ares endows places, objects, and other deities with a savage, dangerous, or militarized quality. Although Ares' name shows his origins as Mycenaean , his reputation for savagery

2184-519: Is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to

2275-608: Is said to have persisted among the Alans . Some have posited that the " Sword of Mars " in later European history alludes to the Huns having adopted Ares. In some parts of Asia Minor, Ares was a prominent oracular deity , something not found in any Hellennic cult to Ares or Roman cult to Mars. Ares was linked in some regions or polities with a local god or cultic hero, and recognised as a higher, more prestigious deity than in mainland Greece. His cults in southern Asia Minor are attested from

2366-475: Is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around

2457-763: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,

2548-650: Is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with

2639-511: Is unleashed in the thirteenth month." Ares was held screaming and howling in the urn until Hermes rescued him, and Artemis tricked the Aloadae into slaying each other. In Nonnus 's Dionysiaca , in the war between Cronus and Zeus, Ares killed an unnamed giant son of Echidna who was allied with Cronus, and described as spitting "horrible poison" and having "snaky" feet. In the 2nd century AD Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis , when

2730-630: The Iliad , the word ares is used as a common noun synonymous with "battle." In the Classical period , Ares is given the epithet Enyalios , which seems to appear on the Mycenaean KN V 52 tablet as 𐀁𐀝𐀷𐀪𐀍 , e-nu-wa-ri-jo . Enyalios was sometimes identified with Ares and sometimes differentiated from him as another war god with separate cult, even in the same town; Burkert describes them as "doubles almost". In mainland Greece and

2821-561: The Achaeans but Aphrodite persuades him to side with the Trojans . During the war, Diomedes fights Hector and sees Ares fighting on the Trojans' side. Diomedes calls for his soldiers to withdraw. Zeus grants Athena permission to drive Ares from the battlefield. Encouraged by Hera and Athena, Diomedes thrusts with his spear at Ares. Athena drives the spear home, and all sides tremble at Ares's cries. Ares flees to Mount Olympus , forcing

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2912-495: The Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It

3003-578: The Iliad by the goddess Dione to her daughter Aphrodite, two chthonic giants, the Aloadae , named Otus and Ephialtes, bound Ares in chains and imprisoned him in a bronze urn, where he remained for thirteen months, a lunar year . "And that would have been the end of Ares and his appetite for war, if the beautiful Eriboea, the young giants' stepmother, had not told Hermes what they had done," she related. In this, [Burkert] suspects "a festival of licence which

3094-516: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as

3185-666: The Peloponnese , only a few places are known to have had a formal temple and cult of Ares. Pausanias (2nd century AD) notes an altar to Ares at Olympia , and the moving of a Temple of Ares to the Athenian agora during the reign of Augustus , essentially rededicating it (2 AD) as a Roman temple to the Augustan Mars Ultor . The Areopagus ("mount of Ares"), a natural rock outcrop in Athens, some distance from

3276-503: The goddess or personification of the Greek war-cry, whose name Ares uses as his own war-cry. Ares's sister Hebe ("Youth") also draws baths for him. According to Pausanias , local inhabitants of Therapne , Sparta , recognized Thero , "feral, savage," as a nurse of Ares. Though Ares plays a relatively limited role in Greek mythology as represented in literary narratives, his numerous love affairs and abundant offspring are often alluded to. The union of Ares and Aphrodite created

3367-492: The nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in

3458-470: The 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into

3549-406: The 5th century BC and well into the later Roman Imperial era, at 29 different sites, and on over 70 local coin issues. He is sometimes represented on coinage of the region by the "Helmet of Ares" or carrying a spear and a shield, or as a fully armed warrior, sometimes accompanied by a female deity. In what is now western Turkey, the Hellenistic city of Metropolis built a monumental temple to Ares as

3640-597: The Acropolis, was supposedly where Ares was tried and acquitted by the gods for his revenge-killing of Poseidon 's son, Halirrhothius , who had raped Ares' daughter Alcippe . Its name was used for the court that met there, mostly to investigate and try potential cases of treason. Numismatist M. Jessop Price states that Ares "typified the traditional Spartan character", but had no important cult in Sparta; and he never occurs on Spartan coins. Pausanias gives two examples of his cult, both of them conjointly with or "within"

3731-532: The Archaic and Classical eras connects Ares and Aphrodite as complementary companions and ideal though adulterous lovers, their cult pairing and Aphrodite as warrior-protector is localised to Crete. In Africa, Maḥrem , the principal god of the kings of Aksum prior to the 4th century AD, was invoked as Ares in Greek inscriptions. The anonymous king who commissioned the Monumentum Adulitanum in

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3822-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit

3913-425: The Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than

4004-495: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in

4095-629: The Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow

4186-685: The Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community

4277-455: The Greeks' association of Ares with the Thracians , whom they regarded as a barbarous and warlike people. Thrace was considered to be Ares's birthplace and his refuge after the affair with Aphrodite was exposed to the general mockery of the other gods. A late-6th-century BC funerary inscription from Attica emphasizes the consequences of coming under Ares's sway: Stay and mourn at

4368-618: The Trojans to fall back. Ares overhears that his son Ascalaphus has been killed and wants to change sides again, rejoining the Achaeans for vengeance, disregarding Zeus's order that no Olympian should join the battle. Athena stops him. Later, when Zeus allows the gods to fight in the war again, Ares attacks Athena to avenge his previous injury. Athena overpowers him by striking him with a boulder. Deimos ("Terror" or "Dread") and Phobos ("Fear") are Ares' companions in war, and according to Hesiod , are also his children by Aphrodite . Eris ,

4459-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),

4550-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of

4641-429: The apple sacred to Ares", but "offers no further comment", nor connections to any aetiological myth. Apples are one of Aphrodites' sacred or symbolic fruits. Littlewood follows Artemidorus claim that to dream of sour apples presages conflict, and lists Ares alongside Eris and the mythological "Apples of Discord". Gods were immortal but could be bound and restrained, both in mythic narrative and in cult practice. There

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4732-513: The archaic tradition represented by the Iliad and Odyssey . In Greek literature , Ares often represents the physical or violent and untamed aspect of war and is the personification of sheer brutality and bloodlust ("overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering", as Burkert puts it), in contrast to his sister, the armored Athena , whose functions as a goddess of intelligence include military strategy and generalship. An association with Ares endows places and objects with

4823-525: The bard in the hall of Alcinous , the Sun-god Helios once spied Ares and Aphrodite having sex secretly in the hall of Hephaestus , her husband. Helios reported the incident to Hephaestus. Contriving to catch the illicit couple in the act, Hephaestus fashioned a finely-knitted and nearly invisible net with which to snare them. At the appropriate time, this net was sprung, and trapped Ares and Aphrodite locked in very private embrace. But Hephaestus

4914-531: The city's protector, not before the 3rd century BC. It is now lost, but the names of some of its priests and priestesses survive, along with the temple's likely depictions on coins of the province. A sanctuary of Aphrodite was established at Sta Lenika , on Crete , between the cities of Lato and Olus , possibly during the Geometric period . It was rebuilt in the late 2nd century BC as a double-sanctuary to Ares and Aphrodite. Inscriptions record disputes over

5005-404: The early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of

5096-567: The epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute

5187-452: The following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in

5278-565: The goddess Venus , gave birth to Aeneas , the Trojan prince and refugee who "founded" Rome several generations before Romulus. In the Hellenization of Latin literature , the myths of Ares were reinterpreted by Roman writers under the name of Mars. Greek writers under Roman rule also recorded cult practices and beliefs pertaining to Mars under the name of Ares. Thus in the classical tradition of later Western art and literature ,

5369-563: The goddess of discord, or Enyo , the goddess of war, bloodshed, and violence, was considered the sister and companion of the violent Ares. In at least one tradition, Enyalius, rather than another name for Ares, was his son by Enyo. Ares may also be accompanied by Kydoimos , the daemon of the din of battle; the Makhai ("Battles"); the "Hysminai" ("Acts of manslaughter"); Polemos , a minor spirit of war, or only an epithet of Ares, since it has no specific dominion; and Polemos's daughter, Alala ,

5460-406: The gods Eros , Anteros , Phobos , Deimos , and Harmonia . Other versions include Alcippe as one of his daughters. Cycnus (Κύκνος) of Macedonia was a son of Ares who tried to build a temple to his father with the skulls and bones of guests and travellers. Heracles fought him and, in one account, killed him. In another account, Ares fought his son's killer but Zeus parted the combatants with

5551-448: The gods and had a habit of eating their guests. Zeus sent Hermes to punish them, and he chose to chop off their hands and feet. Since Polyphonte was descended from him, Ares stopped Hermes, and the two brothers came into an agreement to turn Polyphonte's family into birds instead. Oreius became an eagle owl, Agrius a vulture, and Polyphonte a strix , possibly a small owl, certainly a portent of war; Polyphonte's servant prayed not to become

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5642-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn

5733-552: The instructions given by an oracle of the late Hellenistic era to various cities of Pamphylia (in Anatolia) including Syedra , Lycia and Cilicia , places almost perpetually under threat from pirates. Each was told to set up a statue of "bloody, man-slaying Ares" and provide it with an annual festival in which it was ritually bound with iron fetters ("by Dike and Hermes") as if a supplicant for justice, put on trial and offered sacrifice. The oracle promises that "thus will he become

5824-467: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write

5915-404: The late 2nd or early 3rd century refers to "my greatest god, Ares, who also begat me, through whom I brought under my sway [various peoples]". The monumental throne celebrating the king's conquests was itself dedicated to Ares. In the early 4th century, the last pagan king of Aksum, Ezana , referred to "the one who brought me forth, the invincible Ares". Ares was one of the Twelve Olympians in

6006-640: The membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek

6097-441: The modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and

6188-522: The monstrous Typhon attacked Olympus the gods transformed into animals and fled to Egypt; Ares changed into a fish, the Lepidotus (sacred to the Egyptian war-god Anhur ). Liberalis's koine Greek text is a "completely inartistic" epitome of Nicander 's now lost Heteroeumena (2nd century BC). In Homer 's Iliad , Ares has no fixed allegiance. He promises Athena and Hera that he will fight for

6279-417: The most hateful of all gods who hold Olympus. Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles. ... And yet I will not long endure to see you in pain, since you are my child, and it was to me that your mother bore you. But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinous long since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky." This ambivalence is expressed also in

6370-639: The mythology of the two figures later became virtually indistinguishable. In Renaissance and Neoclassical works of art, Ares's symbols are a spear and helmet, his animal is a dog, and his bird is the vulture . In literary works of these eras, Ares is replaced by the Roman Mars , a romantic emblem of manly valor rather than the cruel and blood-thirsty god of Greek mythology. Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized :  Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized :  Hellēnikḗ )

6461-729: The name is the Mycenaean Greek 𐀀𐀩 , a-re , written in the Linear B syllabic script. The adjectival epithet , Areios ("warlike") was frequently appended to the names of other gods when they took on a warrior aspect or became involved in warfare: Zeus Areios , Athena Areia , even Aphrodite Areia ("Aphrodite within Ares" or "feminine Ares"), who was warlike, fully armoured and armed, partnered with Athena in Sparta , and represented at Kythira 's temple to Aphrodite Urania . In

6552-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks

6643-536: The objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It

6734-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as

6825-490: The ownership of the sanctuary. The names of Ares and Aphrodite appear as witness to sworn oaths, and there is a Victory thanks-offering to Aphrodite, whom Millington believes had capacity as a "warrior-protector acting in the realm of Ares". There were cultic links between the Sta Lenika sanctuary, Knossos and other Cretan states, and perhaps with Argos on the mainland. While the Greek literary and artistic record from both

6916-463: The ridicule of the other gods. Ares' nearest counterpart in Roman religion is Mars , who was given a more important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion as ancestral protector of the Roman people and state. During the Hellenization of Latin literature , the myths of Ares were reinterpreted by Roman writers under the name of Mars, and in later Western art and literature , the mythology of

7007-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of

7098-581: The tomb of dead Kroisos Whom raging Ares destroyed one day, fighting in the foremost ranks. He is one of the Twelve Olympians , and the son of Zeus and Hera . In the Argonautica , the Golden Fleece hangs in a grove sacred to Ares, until its theft by Jason . The Birds of Ares ( Ornithes Areioi ) drop feather darts in defense of the Amazons ' shrine to Ares, as father of their queen, on

7189-539: The two figures became virtually indistinguishable. The etymology of the name Ares is traditionally connected with the Greek word ἀρή ( arē ), the Ionic form of the Doric ἀρά ( ara ), "bane, ruin, curse, imprecation". Walter Burkert notes that "Ares is apparently an ancient abstract noun meaning throng of battle, war." R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin of the name. The earliest attested form of

7280-480: Was Athena. Reports of historic human sacrifice to Ares in an obscure rite known as the Hekatomphonia represent a very long-standing error, repeated through several centuries and well into the modern era. The hekatomphonia was an animal sacrifice to Zeus; it could be offered by any warrior who had personally slain one hundred of the enemy. Pausanias reports that in Sparta, each company of youths sacrificed

7371-574: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or

7462-568: Was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of

7553-557: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe

7644-512: Was an archaic Spartan statue of Ares in chains in the temple of Enyalios (sometimes regarded as the son of Ares, sometimes as Ares himself), which Pausanias claimed meant that the spirit of war and victory was to be kept in the city. The Spartans are known to have ritually bound the images of other deities, including Aphrodite and Artemis (cf Ares and Aphrodite bound by Hephaestus), and in other places there were chained statues of Artemis and Dionysos. Statues of Ares in chains are described in

7735-454: Was carried off by the Harpyes into the country of the Bistones or Milchessians. According to another myth Biston founded the Bistones tribe. This Ancient Thrace –related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Ares Ares ( / ˈ ɛər iː z / ; Ancient Greek : Ἄρης , Árēs [árɛːs] ) is the Greek god of war and courage. He

7826-495: Was given an important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion , as a guardian deity of the entire Roman state and its people. Under the influence of Greek culture , Mars was identified with Ares, but the character and dignity of the two deities differed fundamentally. Mars was represented as a means to secure peace , and he was a father (pater) of the Roman people. In one tradition, he fathered Romulus and Remus through his rape of Rhea Silvia . In another, his lover,

7917-531: Was not satisfied with his revenge, so he invited the Olympian gods and goddesses to view the unfortunate pair. For the sake of modesty, the goddesses demurred, but the male gods went to witness the sight. Some commented on the beauty of Aphrodite, others remarked that they would eagerly trade places with Ares, but all who were present mocked the two. Once the couple was released, the embarrassed Ares returned to his homeland, Thrace, and Aphrodite went to Paphos. In

8008-458: Was one of three otherwise unnamed deities that Thracian commoners were said to worship. Herodotus recognises and names the other two as "Dionysus" and "Artemis", and claims that the Thracian aristocracy exclusively worshiped "Hermes". In Herodotus' Histories , the Scythians worship an indigenous form of Greek Ares, who is otherwise unnamed, but ranked beneath Tabiti (whom Herodotus claims as

8099-635: Was thought by some to reflect his likely origins as a Thracian deity. Some cities in Greece and several in Asia Minor held annual festivals to bind and detain him as their protector. In parts of Asia Minor, he was an oracular deity. Still further away from Greece, the Scythians were said to ritually kill one in a hundred prisoners of war as an offering to their equivalent of Ares. The later belief that ancient Spartans had offered human sacrifice to Ares may owe more to mythical prehistory, misunderstandings, and reputation than to reality. Though there are many literary allusions to Ares' love affairs and children, he has

8190-580: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect

8281-673: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage

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