Ares

In Homer, Ares appears in one of Demodocus’s songs at the Phaeacian feast. He is the lover Aphrodite takes while her husband Hephaestus is at the forge. The smith god strings an invisible net above his own bed, catches the two of them in it, and calls the other gods in to laugh. It is a comic interlude, a palate cleanser between the harder songs about Troy. The retelling cuts it. The Phaeacian feast keeps the songs that hit Odysseus directly, the war stories that make him weep, and skips the divine comedy. Ares belongs to the source material as the god of the kind of warfare Odysseus does not represent. Brute force. The opposite of cunning. He has no business in a story about a man trying to think his way home.