Characters
- Artemis — challenges Athena; felled and sprawls over seven acres
- Lyssa — strikes Ares with a boundary-stone; then buffets Aphrodite
Places
- Assembly — site of the divine combat
- Boundary-stone of ancient men — Athena’s weapon
- Scamander’s banks — nearby after the river is quelled
Themes
Narrative
Once Hephaestus has driven Scamander back to his banks, the other gods, freed to fight, turn on one another. Ares, still smarting from Diomedes’ wound in Book 5 and from Athena’s long patronage of the Achaeans, rushes at Athena and taunts her for setting mortals against him. He casts his spear at her aegis; the immortal shield holds. Athena picks up a great black stone that men of old had set as a boundary-mark in the plain and strikes Ares on the neck. He falls sprawling, his armor clatters, and he covers seven ploughlands. Aphrodite comes to lead him from the field; Athena pursues and strikes her on the breast with her fist, so that Aphrodite too collapses beside him. Hera smiles; Athena boasts that thus should all who aid the Trojans against the Argives fare.
The duel isolates Athena’s supremacy over Ares in Homeric theology: war-goddess of counsel defeats war-god of rage with a field-stone, not a crafted weapon. Catalogue it apart from Diomedes’ earlier wounding of Ares (04/017, 04/129), which was mortal-aided; here the combat is purely divine within the theomachy Zeus has licensed.