Ares Trapped in a Bronze Jar by the Aloadae Giants

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ares, god of war; Otus and Ephialtes, the twin giant sons of Poseidon and Iphimedeia; and Hermes, the messenger god who secured Ares’ release.
• Setting: Olympus and the mortal world beneath it; Greek myth, drawn from the tradition that includes Homer’s passing reference in the Iliad and later retellings.
• The turn: Otus and Ephialtes overpower Ares and seal him inside a bronze jar, where he remains imprisoned for thirteen months.
• The outcome: Hermes frees Ares; the Aloadae die by each other’s spears when Artemis lures them into killing one another.
• The legacy: The episode stands as the one recorded instance of Ares - god of war - being rendered completely powerless, and it remains the clearest ancient example of divine captivity at mortal hands.

Ares did not go willingly into that jar. He was overpowered. The god of war, bronze-armored and blood-eager, the deity before whom armies scattered and cities burned - caught, sealed, and left to rot in a vessel of his enemies’ choosing. That detail is worth sitting with before the rest of the story begins.

The twins who did it were Otus and Ephialtes, the Aloadae, born of Poseidon and a mortal woman named Iphimedeia. Even by the standards of Greek giants they were extraordinary. Each year they grew a cubit in breadth and a fathom in height, until by the time they were old enough to act on their ambitions they were among the largest things walking the earth. Their father’s blood gave them the sea’s indifference to resistance. They had never been stopped.

What the Giants Wanted

Their ambitions were, in a word, Olympian. The Aloadae looked at the divine order and found it an obstacle rather than an authority. They began piling mountains - Ossa onto Pelion, Pelion onto the flanks of Olympus itself - intending to stack the range high enough to breach the home of the gods. Whether they believed this would actually work, or whether the act was as much declaration as plan, is not recorded. What is recorded is that they attempted it.

Their desires ran personal as well as territorial. Otus wanted Hera - Zeus’s own wife, queen of Olympus. Ephialtes wanted Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, who had sworn herself to eternal virginity. These were not modest choices. The twins announced what they intended and moved toward it, as if the will to do a thing were the same as permission.

Thirteen Months in Bronze

Ares moved against them, as the god of war might be expected to do. The outcome was not what anyone on Olympus would have anticipated. The giants caught him. The specifics of how they subdued him are lost - whether by ambush, by sheer mass, or by some stratagem - but the result is not: they bound Ares and sealed him inside a bronze jar. He was left there, in the dark and the stillness, while the twins went on about their designs.

Thirteen months passed. For thirteen months the god who embodied martial violence could do nothing. Could not strike, could not escape, could not even be heard - no god on Olympus knew where he was. The bronze held. This was a humiliation without precedent. Warriors pray to Ares; armies invoke his name before battle. And there he sat, in a container.

The Aloadae, meanwhile, continued their campaign. The mountains were being stacked. Their intentions regarding Hera and Artemis had not changed.

Hermes and the Bronze Jar

It was not another warrior who found him. It was Hermes - the messenger, the thief, the one who moves between worlds and crosses borders that stop everyone else. Hermes had a gift for locating what was hidden. He found the jar, he found Ares inside it, and he opened it.

The how of the rescue matters less than the who: it was wit that freed the god of war, not strength. No champion broke the jar open in a show of opposing force. Hermes simply went where others couldn’t, found what others hadn’t, and acted before anyone could stop him. Ares emerged, and returned to Olympus.

The Deer Between Two Spears

The Aloadae did not survive their ambitions long after that. Their end came through Artemis - the very goddess Ephialtes had intended to take. She appeared before them in the form of a deer and ran between them. The twins lunged. They threw their spears at the same moment from opposite sides, and the deer was no longer there. The spears crossed the space where she had been and buried themselves in the brothers instead. Otus killed Ephialtes. Ephialtes killed Otus.

The mountains they had piled up were left where they were. The jar was left where it was. The plan to storm Olympus died with them, undone by a single animal that was not what it appeared to be.

Ares went back to war. The gods went back to order. And the story of what the Aloadae had managed - of thirteen months during which the god of war sat sealed in bronze while two sons of Poseidon nearly reached the sky - did not go away.