Enyalius

Enyalius or Enyalios (Greek: Ἐνυάλιος) in Greek mythology is generally a son of Ares by Enyo^{[citation needed]} and also a byname of Ares the god of war. Though Enyalius as a by-name of Ares is the most accepted version, in Mycenaean times Ares and Enyalius were considered separate deities. Enyalius is often seen as the God of soldiers and warriors from Ares cult. On the Mycenaean Greek Linear B KN V 52 tablet, the name 𐀁𐀝𐀷𐀪𐀍, e-nu-wa-ri-jo, has been interpreted to refer to this same Enyalios. It has been suggested that the name of Enyalius ultimately represents an Anatolian loanword, although alternative hypotheses treat it as an inherited Indo-European compound or a borrowing from an indigenous language of Crete.

Enyalios is mentioned nine times in Homer's Iliad and in four of them it is in the same formula describing Meriones who is one of the leaders of warriors from Crete. Homer calls Ares by the epithet Enyalios in Iliad, book xx.

A scholiast on Homer declares that the poet Alcman sometimes identified Ares with Enyalius and sometimes differentiated him, and that Enyalius was sometimes made the son of Ares by Enyo and sometimes the son of Cronus and Rhea.

Aristophanes (in Peace) envisages Ares and Enyalios as separate gods of war.

In the Anabasis, Xenophon mentions that the Greek mercenaries raise a war cry to Enyalios as they charge at the Persian Army.

In Argonautica book III, lines 363–367, Jason sets the chthonic earthborn warriors fighting among themselves by hurling a boulder in their midst:

But Jason called to mind the counsels of Medea full of craft, and seized from the plain a huge round boulder, a terrible quoit of Ares Enyalius; four stalwart youths could not have raised it from the ground even a little.

The urbane Alexandrian author gives his old tale a touch of appropriate Homeric antiquity by using such an ancient epithet.