Or, if you just want the straight answers, then they can be found here:

1. Ares appeared to Xena as her reflection and/or the forms of her soldiers. He could also have only talked to her while invisible and whispered burningly in her ear.
2. Xena would not have originally asked for Lyceus because she didn’t know that Ares had the power to raise her brother from the dead. Too, he likely would have refused to do it or used the promise of resurrecting her brother as another means of stringing Xena along. After all, Lyceus’s death is what drove Xena into Ares’s arms in the first place. Too, the villagers who were resurrected were not quite real, I don’t think. Ares puts a lot of stock by wording; so, since he only brought them back as defenders of Xena, and she tricked him, I’m sure he let them die pretty quickly after she left town. Lastly, I don’t think Xena or Gabrielle would have wanted to owe Ares again or disturb their loved ones in the Elysian fields, etc.
3. Cyrene killed Toris, like she killed her husband(s).
4. This was done as punishment for the Xena-Callisto body-swap. Hades was not pleased when he learned what Ares had done, and in the next episode, we learn that Hades gave Ares's sword and godhood to the dead King Sisyphus. This might be what Ares is talking about in "The Furies" when he says he's “been on the outs with the family before.”
5. The reason this didn’t happen with the other gods when their objects got stolen is two-fold. First, the items stolen— Hephaestus’s metal and chains, Hermes and Hades’s helmets, and Apollo’s urn— weren’t their primary symbols. Second, Ares (and later, Aphrodite) suffered from stolen identity as well. The world became more war-like in “Ten Little Warlords” and less loving in “You Are There” because other characters wrongfully took the deities’ places. Hades and King Sisphus stole Ares’s godhood with the intention of replacing him, as Caligula did to Aphrodite. This is why the world did not lose terror, wisdom, hunting, the underworld, etc. after the Twilight of the Gods. The gods died, but Xena had no intention of seating herself on their thrones.
6. She started out in her protected oasis, mourning, and later fled to the country.
7. His powers worked in the underworld before and during “Intimate Stranger,” but never again after being punished for the body-swap.
8. They both provided Gabrielle and Xena with their children. Like the interconnected but separate mehndi, the soulmates pulled the same people into their orbits.
9. After hearing Gabrielle’s prayer and rescuing Hope from the river as requested, Aphrodite appeared to the bard just after the end of “Gabrielle’s Hope.” She healed Gabrielle with Athena’s blessing and then helped her forget all her traumas. Too, she committed herself to taking care of and protecting Gabrielle behind the scenes. But, Dahak banished Aphrodite in order to clear Hope’s path to Gabrielle. Thus, Aphrodite couldn’t shield Gabrielle anymore (as she would later do again throughout season five), and “Maternal Instincts” began.
10. In addition to the emotional upheaval caused by the episodes, their logic was absolutely nonsensical.
11. Aphrodite misunderstood Gabrielle’s prayer to keep her baby safe and teach her love, and later felt the gaping lacks in the child, thus giving Hope her obsession with Gabrielle (like the double dose Aphrodite gave to Xena in "Fish, Femmes, and Gems," but Hope was never able to break the spell.
12. The Furies orchestrated and caused both incidents, for all participants.
13. Aphrodite, of course. :)
14. Athena conjured it from Xena and hid it somewhere no mortal would ever be able to find it again. It has since been lost forever due to her death.
15. She was reliving the Rift Arc; time shattered before her eyes and disoriented her.
16. Yes. She even got to be a better mother to him than Gabrielle got to be to her.
17. Hope sent him to Dahak’s side after emerging from the lava pit. Dahak later deemed his offspring unworthy of him and so didn’t care about what happened to them, which let Ares off the hook. Of course, the god of war wasn’t really invested in Hope or The Destroyer either and so didn’t bother to help them. Instead, Ares chose to try and get Xena to marry him.
18. She was searching for Hope.
19. Please see the linked posts^; it’d take much too long to explain here, and I’m already exhausted from typing up all the previous answers. heh
20. She came to deeply love and care for Gabrielle after hearing the bard’s plea by that river in Brittania. She tried time and again to talk her family out of attacking Xena, Gabrielle, and Eve, until she finally had to move against them.
    Aphrodite’s heart broke when Gabrielle fell off her radar by getting trapped in Brunhilda’s eternal flame. Remember, she had just gotten the bard back after a quarter-century of thinking Gabrielle dead only to lose her yet again… after having paid to keep Gabrielle alive with the lives of just about everyone she had ever known and loved, for millennia. The last of her kind, no one left to love, and no one to love her (minus her brother whom she couldn’t ‘sense’ anymore since he gave up his godhood and who couldn’t get into contact with her either for that same reason) …Is it any wonder that Aphrodite fled her homeland and lost her identity?
21. Gabrielle could hand the chakram to Meg, Princess Diana, and/or Leah. Or, if it has to be family, then there’s always poor Eve and/or one of Toris’s presumed daughters. Of course, I now see a path for Ares resurrecting her given my latest findings and pondering.