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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8401480" data-attributes="member: 6801228">A few reasons. I'm not a major Greek Scholar though, so take my rememberances of dozens of bits of trivia with a healthy dose of "history is hard"1) Ares was explicitly supposed to be terrible, because most Greeks saw war as being terrible and pointlessly destructive. The Greeks didn't LIKE war. The Romans LOVED war. 2) Athena is a much much older deity. Her, Zeus, Aphrodite, Persephone and Poseidon can be easily traced back to the Minoans (spelling) before the Greeks. And she was a big deal. Like, she was reduced to being the Daughter of Zues sprang fully formed from his head in the Greek Myths. In her originating form, she was his equal (Poseidon was king of the gods, covering the underworld and the oceans. Hades didn't exist) and was a goddess of war and wisdom even back then (I think)2.5) Part of her being reduced to the daughter of Zeus, and the creation of Ares likely (or maybe, again, not a scholar of this stuff) is because the Greeks were very very misogynistic. They couldn't stand having her be who she was (same with aphrodite, who also had war goddess connotations, which survived in Sparta) but she was also too important to fully get rid of. So, since they couldn't erase her, or make her terrible, they made Ares, the REAL war god. Also, syncretization and mythological drift make having a "set" mythology and such basically impossible.I think the bolded part is more of the problem. Almost no religion or mythology I know of has both Evil Gods and powerful evil spirits that oppose the gods. Generally either both sides are divine or one side is divine and the other fiendish. You don't have a good divine, an evil divine, and a fiendish.</blockquote>

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