Hephaestus

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Hephaestus refused to come home. The Greek god of artisans, blacksmiths, and fire had been thrown out of heaven by his own mother, Hera, and his answer was to forge her a golden throne. When she sat on it, invisible fetters locked her in place, and she could not stand again. The other gods pleaded. He told them, "I have no mother." This is the only Olympian who entered the divine family by being cast out of it, the smith whose disability set him apart on a mountain of perfect bodies. He worked at an anvil with twenty bellows that moved at his command. He shaped weapons no mortal could match and built handmaidens of gold that could think and speak. So how did a god rejected for his lameness become the maker of almost everything the gods owned? Why did a wronged husband stage the most public humiliation in mythology? And why do scholars now read his curved feet as a memory of poison?

• 2. The Cast-Out Son

  ›

  Hera gives birth to Hephaestus on her own in Hesiod's Theogony, an act of revenge after Zeus fathered Athena without her. The accounts of his parentage refuse to settle. Homer's Iliad calls him the son of Hera and seems at two points to name Zeus as his father, though those passages may not mean it literally. The Odyssey says plainly that he had "two parents," presumably Zeus and Hera. Apollodorus repeats both versions, the solo birth and the joint one.

  Hera ejected him from the heavens in one branch of the myth because of his congenital impairment. He fell into the ocean and was raised there by Thetis, mother of Achilles and one of the fifty Nereids, together with the Oceanid Eurynome. A second account flips the blame. Trying to shield his mother from Zeus's advances, Hephaestus was hurled down by Zeus instead. He fell for an entire day and landed on Lemnos, where the Sintians, a tribe native to the island, nursed him and taught him to be a master craftsman.

  Homer makes him disabled from birth. Later writers turn the disability into the result of that second fall, an injury earned on the way down. The two stories disagree on cause but agree on consequence. The god of fire began his life in salt water, hidden in a sea cave by women who were not his mother.

• 3. Return By Wine

  ›

  Dionysus solved the problem of the locked throne. After Hephaestus trapped Hera and refused every appeal, it was Ares who first tried to drag him back to Olympus, and the fire god drove him off with torches. The god of wine took a gentler route. He got Hephaestus drunk and carried the subdued smith home on the back of a mule, surrounded by revelers.

  Attic and Corinthian potters loved this scene. Painted pottery shows the procession with Dionysus holding the bridle and carrying the smith's tools, including a double-headed axe. The padded dancers and phallic figures around the mule mark the parade as part of the dithyrambic celebrations that fed into the satyr plays of fifth-century Athens. Wares like these were prized by the Etruscans, and the theme of the homecoming may have traveled from Attic vase-painters into Etruria.

  Pausanias saw the story painted in the temple of Dionysus in Athens. He recorded what was there: "Dionysus bringing Hephaestus up to heaven," the golden chair with invisible fetters, and the smith who "refused to listen to any other of the gods except Dionysus." The temple was built in the fifth century. By the time the traveler stood before the image, the price of Hera's release had already been negotiated. According to Hyginus, Zeus promised the smith anything, and what he asked for was a wife.

• 4. Maker Of The Gods

  ›

  Twenty bellows worked at his bidding inside his own palace on Olympus, beside his anvil. Almost any finely wrought metalwork in Greek myth, anything imbued with power, traces back to this workshop. He designed all the thrones in the Palace of Olympus and the Aegis breastplate. He made Hermes's winged helmet and sandals, Aphrodite's famed girdle, Eros's bow and arrows, Helios's chariot, Heracles's bronze clappers, and the shoulder of Pelops.

  Hephaestus forged the first woman. He created Pandora and her pithos as the gift the gods gave to mankind. In some versions, the fire Prometheus stole for humanity came from this forge. The smith also lent out his help. He gave the blinded Orion his apprentice Cedalion to serve as a guide.

  Later accounts crowd the workshop with the Cyclopes Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, skilled blacksmiths who forged Zeus's thunderbolts, Poseidon's trident, and Hades's helmet of darkness. His war work was just as specific. When the Trojan War began, Hephaestus sided with the Greeks and forged the armor of Achilles, the cuirass of Diomedes, and Agamemnon's staff of office. Yet the Trojans worshipped him too, and he saved one of their men from being killed by Diomedes.

• 5. Living Gold

  ›

  Tripods on golden wheels rolled in and out of the assembly hall of the celestials at his wish, the first of Hephaestus's machines that Homer describes. The smith built automatons of metal to do his work. His strangest creations were handmaidens wrought of gold in the semblance of living maids. They had, in Homer's words, "understanding in their hearts, and speech and strength," and they moved to support him as he walked.

  Golden and silver lions and dogs stood at the entrance of the palace of Alkinoos, set there to bite invaders. These guard dogs did not age and did not perish. The same idea appears in the story of a golden dog placed by Rhea to guard the infant Zeus and his nurse, the goat Amaltheia, on Krete. Tantalus was said to have stolen that automaton, or to have persuaded Pandareos to steal it for him. Later texts try to rewrite the golden dog as Rhea herself, transformed by Hephaestus.

  The smith made weapons of war as readily as servants. He killed the Giant Mimas by throwing molten iron at him, and he fought another Giant, Aristaeus, who fled. When Hephaestus fell exhausted in that battle, Helios picked him up in his chariot. In gratitude, the smith forged four ever-flowing fountains and fire-breathing bulls for Helios's son Aeetes.

• 6. The Invisible Net

  ›

  Helios told him everything. The all-seeing Sun revealed that Aphrodite, married to Hephaestus, was having an affair with Ares, the god of war. The smith answered with his craft. He made a chain-link net so fine it was invisible, then waited for the lovers to lie together. The net trapped them in bed, and Hephaestus dragged the pair to Mount Olympus to shame them before the gods.

  The gods laughed at the naked lovers. Poseidon talked Hephaestus into freeing them by guaranteeing that Ares would pay the adulterer's fine, or paying it himself. In the Odyssey, Hephaestus says he will return Aphrodite to her father and demand back his bride price. Some versions hold that Zeus never returned the dowry, and that Aphrodite simply charmed her way back into her husband's good graces.

  The marriage itself is unstable across the sources. The Iliad gives Hephaestus the Grace Charis as his wife during the Trojan War, and the Theogony gives him the Grace Aglaea, with no mention of Aphrodite at all. The much later Dionysiaca of Nonnus says the two were once married but have since separated, calling Aphrodite his "ancient wife." A late interpolation adds the soldier Alectryon, posted by Ares to watch for Helios, who fell asleep on guard. When Helios caught the lovers anyway, the enraged Ares turned Alectryon into a rooster, which crows at dawn ever since.

• 7. Crafts And Curses

  ›

  Harmonia received a beautiful, cursed gift on her wedding day. The Thebans told that Ares and Aphrodite's union produced Harmonia, while Hephaestus and Aphrodite usually had no child. Because Harmonia was conceived during Aphrodite's marriage to him, Hephaestus took revenge. He gave her a finely worked necklace that brought suffering to her descendants, a curse that ran down to the story of Oedipus.

  Athena escaped him by a hair. An Athenian founding myth says she refused a union with Hephaestus. Pseudo-Apollodorus records that he tried to force himself on her, she pushed him away, and his semen fell on her thigh. Athena wiped it off with a tuft of wool and threw it into the dust, impregnating Gaia, who gave birth to Erichthonius. Athena adopted the child as her own. Hyginus tells a parallel tale in which Hephaestus demands Athena as his wife because he had split open Zeus's skull to let her be born.

  Hephaestus stood beside Athena as a teacher of the mortal crafts and arts. At Athens they shared temples and festivals, and both were believed to hold great healing powers. Lemnian earth, taken from the spot where he fell, was thought to cure madness, snakebite, and haemorrhage. The Greeks placed miniature statues of him near their hearths, the oldest of all his representations, and at Athens stood his temple near the agora, the Hephaesteum, miscalled the "Theseum."

• 8. The Poisoned Smith

  ›

  His feet sometimes point the wrong way. In vase paintings Hephaestus bends over his anvil with his feet curved back-to-front, and he walks with the aid of a stick. Mythological sources call him "lame" and "halting." In some myths he built himself a wheeled chair or chariot to move around, demonstrating his skill while supporting his mobility. The Iliad says he built twenty bronze-wheeled tripods for the same purpose.

  The disability runs through his whole family of figures. The Argonaut Palaimonius, called a "son of Hephaestus" and so a bronze-smith, also had a mobility impairment. The Cabeiri on Samothrace, other "sons of Hephaestus," were identified with the crab by the lexicographer Hesychius, and the word for "crab-footed" signified "lame." The Cabeiri were physically disabled too.

  Some readers take his appearance as a record of real poisoning. Bronze Age smiths added arsenic to copper to make harder arsenical bronze, especially when tin was scarce, and many would have suffered chronic arsenic poisoning. The lameness and damaged skin of the mythic smith match peripheral neuropathy and skin cancer from arsenicosis. Hephaestus was an iron-age smith, not a bronze-age one, so the link is a memory carried forward from older folk tradition. That image of the disabled craftsman repeats far beyond Greece, in the Ugarit god Kothar-wa-Khasis, who is known from afar by a walk that may be a limp.

  A red stone at Corycus carried his name. Pliny the Elder wrote of the Hephaestitis, or "Hephaestus stone," which reflected images like a mirror and cooled boiling water poured over it at once, yet set a parched substance on fire when placed in the sun. The god's name attached itself to places as well. The Lycians dedicated a city to him and called it Hephaestia, and the whole island of Lemnos was sacred to him, with its own Hephaestia named in his honor.

  His cult was strikingly narrow. He had almost no cults except in Athens, the manufacturing center where the smith god belonged. The famous statue of Hephaestus there, by Alcamenes, portrayed his physical disability only subtly. At Sparta he appeared in the temple of Athena of the Bronze House in the act of delivering his mother. In Rome he was equated with Vulcan, and Greek colonists in southern Italy linked him to the volcano gods Adranus of Mount Etna and Vulcanus of the Lipari islands.

  The name still travels. The minor planet 2212 Hephaistos, discovered in 1978 by the Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh, carries it into the sky. So does the protein hephaestin, which oxidizes iron absorbed by intestinal cells so the body can move it along. The god who shaped metal for the gods now lends his name to the chemistry of iron inside a human gut.