Alce - E L Hunter

The Greeks had a name for that force, alke, and a goddess to go with it: Alce, the personified force of strength and courage. Homer describes the spirit of alke "entering" warriors on the field, possessing them the way a god takes hold of a mortal. Yet she has almost no temples, almost no myths, almost no face. She is a deity everyone invoked and no one quite worshipped.

From a contested shrine in Pausanias, a handful of martial lines in Homer and Pindar, and the philosophers' arguments over what strength is for, this book assembles her. It sets her among her louder cousins, Nike and Kratos and Bia, and asks why the Greeks singled out this one as the defensive kind: not the power to crush, but the power to hold the line.

She never needed temples. She was what was left when everything else failed.