The Temple of Ares was a building located in the northern part of the Ancient Agora of Athens

Ancient Agora of Athens

The Ancient Agora of Athens is the best-known example of an ancient Greek agora, located to the northwest of the Acropolis and is bounded on the south by the hill of the Areopagus and on the west by the hill known as the Colonus Agoraeus.-History:The agora in Athens had private housing, until it...

. The Temple was identified as such by Pausanias

Pausanias (geographer)

Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical...

 but the ruins present today indicate a complex history. Ares had a temple somewhat like Athena's .

The foundations are of early Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

 construction and date, but fragments of the superstructure, now located at the western end of the temple, can be dated to the 5th century BC. From the fragments archaeologists are confident that they belonged to a Doric

Doric order

The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.-History:...

 peripteral temple of a similar size, plan and date to the Temple of Hephaestus

Temple of Hephaestus

The Temple of Hephaestus, also known as the Hephaisteion or earlier as the Theseion, is the best-preserved ancient Greek temple; it remains standing largely as built. It is a Doric peripteral temple, and is located at the north-west side of the Agora of Athens, on top of the Agoraios Kolonos hill....

. Marks on the remaining stones indicate that the temple may have originally stood elsewhere and was dismantled, moved and reconstructed on the Roman base - a practice common during the Roman occupation of Greece. The temple probably came from the sanctuary of Athena Pallenis at modern Stavro, where foundations have been found but no temple remains are present.
The Temple of Ares, of which only the foundations are still visible, is of interest because of its curious history. It is one of several examples of so-called ‘itinerant’ or ‘wandering temples’. The dimensions and the style of the architectural fragments that have been found around the temple show that it was designed and built around 450-440 BC, in the ‘high period’ of Classical art.

The architect, whose name is unknown, is also thought to have been responsible for the building of the Temple of Hephaistos (in the Agora, on the hill just to the west), the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous and the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion. However, when excavating the Temple of Ares in the Agora, it became apparent that many of the associated blocks had been inscribed with single letters or ‘masons’ marks’, whose form was typical for the 1st century BC.

The excavators also found pottery shards of that period below the floor of the temple and concluded that the ‘Temple of Ares’ must have originally stood somewhere else and had been dismantled to be carefully rebuilt in the Agora in the period of the Roman Emperor Augustus. In the process, portions of other temples were added as well (for instance, parts of the roof of the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion), perhaps to make up for pieces that had gone missing since the original construction of the Temple some 400 years earlier.

Recent excavations in Pallene, to the east of Athens, have uncovered what are in all likelihood the original foundations of this temple. If this identification is correct, it also shows that the temple was originally dedicated to Athena. The Romans did not only transfer the temple, but also rededicated to another god. This was probably done to promote the worship of the Roman Emperor and his family.

In inscriptions of the time, the grandson of Augustus is called ‘the new Ares’. The temple may therefore have been reassembled and rededicated in his honor, occupying a prominent place right in the middle of the old and much venerated Agora.

The Temple of Ares is not the only example of a wandering temple in the Agora. Parts of a Doric temple in Thorikos were re-used to build a temple in the southeast corner of the Agora and elements from the Athena Temple at Sounion to build another one in the southwest corner. This way, the Roman rulers turned the Agora into some kind of ‘museum’ of Classical Greek art and architecture.
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• Camp II, John McK. (2003) The Athenian Agora: A Short Guide to the Excavations. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens. ISBN 0-87661-643-0.