The Aloadae Bind Ares in a Bronze Jar

Catalogue ID: 02-olympian-gods/120-aloadae-bind-ares-bronze-jar-iliad

Cycle: Olympian gods — Ares / Aloadae humiliation

Version line: Homeric digression (*Iliad* 5) — Otus and Ephialtes imprison Ares thirteen months

Sources: Homer, *Iliad* 5.385–391; cf. Apollodorus, *Library* 1.7.4 (Aloadae overview)

Source file: /workspace/greek-myth-catalogue/02-olympian-gods/120-aloadae-bind-ares-bronze-jar-iliad.md

Characters

Aphrodite — frame of the consolatory digression
Ares — imprisoned thirteen months; nearly destroyed
Eeriboea — informant who reveals the captivity
Otus and Ephialtes — binders of Ares
The Hours — rescuer who steals Ares from the jar

Places

Bronze jar — prison of Ares (location unspecified in Homer)
Olympus — where Dione tells the tale

Themes

Narrative

In the *Iliad*, when Aphrodite flees Diomedes’s spear-wound to Olympus, her mother Dione consoles her with examples of gods who suffered at mortal hands. Among them: Otus and Ephialtes, the Aloadae, bound Ares in a bronze jar and held him thirteen months. Ares would have perished there in the bonds of the jar had stepmother (or foster-kin) Eeriboea not told Hermes; Hermes stole the war-god out already failing from the long confinement. The episode humiliates Ares without the twins’ later assault on heaven. It stands in Homeric theology as proof that even Olympians can be mastered by force and stealth, and it gives Hermes another Argeiphontes-style rescue. Catalogue the jar apart from the Aloadae’s mountain-stacking and death by Apollo (or Artemis’s deer trick in other tellings).