Hephaestus
The Greek god of fire and metalwork, the lame smith of the gods. Greek vase painters show him with a hammer and tongs, or riding a donkey back to Mount Olympus with Dionysus.
Meaning
Hephaestus (hi-FES-tuhs, as Dictionary.com respells it) is the god of fire, metalworking and handicrafts, whom the Romans identified with Vulcan. The Iliad describes his workshop on Olympus: twenty bellows blowing on the crucibles, and the god setting a great anvil on its stand and taking “a sturdy hammer” in one hand and the tongs in the other to make Achilles’ shield. He walks with a stout staff, limping, helped along by handmaidens made of gold. The short Homeric Hymn to Hephaestus praises him, with Athena, for teaching crafts to people who had lived in mountain caves “like wild beasts”. Artists marked him out by his lameness: on the Parthenon’s east frieze he sits beside Athena, and the Acropolis Museum points to the walking stick under his armpit as the sign of it. Pausanias saw his temple above the Cerameicus in Athens, with a statue of Athena standing by it. Hellenic polytheists, a small modern revival of the old religion, honour him with the other Olympians, mostly in prayers and offerings at home, Religion News Service reported in 2017.
Origin and history
The poems disagree about how he became lame. In the first book of the Iliad, Hephaestus reminds his mother Hera that Zeus once caught him by the foot and hurled him from the threshold of heaven: “all day I flew, and at the set of sun I fell in Lemnos”, where the Sintian people looked after him. Apollodorus’s handbook of myths says Zeus threw him out for siding with Hera and that he “was lamed of his legs” by the fall. In other accounts it is Hera who throws him out. Pausanias heard that Hera threw him down when he was born; the Metropolitan Museum’s label for a vase by Lydos says she cast him out of Olympus because he was born lame. In the Odyssey, Hephaestus himself says “feeble was I born” and blames his father and mother. Apollodorus adds that Hera bore him without a father, while Homer makes him a son of Zeus.
The same Odyssey song makes him the husband of Aphrodite. He traps her and Ares in unbreakable bonds on his bed and calls the gods to see, and they laugh that the slow god has caught the swiftest. At the birth of Athena, Apollodorus says, either Prometheus or Hephaestus split the head of Zeus with an axe; his translator James Frazer notes that the usual account, the one the vase painters followed, gave the axe to Hephaestus.
The return to Olympus
Painters loved one story about him more than any other. Pausanias tells it from paintings in the sanctuary of Dionysus at Athens: in revenge for his fall, Hephaestus sent Hera a golden chair with invisible fetters, and when she sat in it she was held fast. He would listen to no god but Dionysus, who made him drunk and brought him back to heaven. A column-krater by Lydos of about 550 BC in the Metropolitan Museum spreads the procession round the whole vase, with satyrs and maenads escorting the god; the museum calls it one of the first vases on which wine, women and song are shown. On a jug by the Eretria Painter of about 430 to 420 BC the procession has shrunk to one donkey carrying both gods, Dionysus holding his wine cup with both hands and Hephaestus behind him with a hammer and tongs in his left hand. The Met suggests that the donkey or mule in these scenes invited a comparison with aristocratic riders on their horses.
Hephaestus and Vulcan
The Romans called him Vulcan. In Apuleius’s Golden Ass, the chariot of Venus is a wedding gift from “her husband Vulcanus”, so finely made that gold and silver could not compare with it.
Read next
- Next in Greek gods and their symbolsHermesThe Greek messenger god, herald of Zeus and guide of the dead to the underworld. Greek artists give him a broad-brimmed traveller’s hat, winged sandals and a herald’s staff, the kerykeion, which the Romans called the caduceus.
- In Egyptian gods and their symbolsPtahThe god of Memphis and patron of craftsmen, drawn as a man wrapped like a mummy, in a close cap, holding the was sceptre, the ankh and the djed pillar. The Greeks called him Hephaestus, and the Apis bull of Memphis was thought to hold his soul.
See also
Aphrodite, Dionysus, Gods of fire, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon.
Sources
- Hephaestus (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Hephaestus” (Random House Unabridged Dictionary and The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy), Dictionary.com, entry and pronunciation
- The Iliad of Homer (tr. Lang, Leaf and Myers), Homer, The Iliad, translated by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers (1883), Project Gutenberg eBook #3059, Project Gutenberg, Book I, ll. 590–594; Book XVIII
- Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White), Hesiod, Theogony; Shield of Heracles; The Homeric Hymns, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Loeb Classical Library, 1914), Project Gutenberg eBook #348, Project Gutenberg, Homeric Hymn XX, To Hephaestus
- The Odyssey of Homer (tr. Butcher and Lang), Homer, The Odyssey, translated by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (1879), Project Gutenberg eBook #1728, Project Gutenberg, Book VIII
- Apollodorus, Library 1.3.5 (tr. J. G. Frazer), Apollodorus, The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer (Loeb, 1921), 1.3.5, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Apollod. 1.3.5
- Apollodorus, Library 1.3.6 (tr. J. G. Frazer), Apollodorus, The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer (Loeb, 1921), 1.3.6, with Frazer’s note, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Apollod. 1.3.6 and Frazer’s note 2
- Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.20.3 (tr. W. H. S. Jones), Pausanias, Description of Greece, translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (Loeb, 1918), 1.20.3, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Paus. 1.20.3
- Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.14.6 (tr. W. H. S. Jones), Pausanias, Description of Greece, translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (Loeb, 1918), 1.14.6, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Paus. 1.14.6
- Parthenon, east frieze, block V (Acropolis Museum), Acropolis Museum, “Parthenon. East frieze. Block 5 (V). Fragment”, collection entry, Acropolis Museum, description of the block
- Column-krater attributed to Lydos, 31.11.11 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Terracotta column-krater attributed to Lydos, Attic, ca. 550 BC, accession 31.11.11, catalogue entry, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogue description
- Chous attributed to the Eretria Painter, 08.258.22 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Terracotta oinochoe (chous) attributed to the Eretria Painter, Attic, ca. 430–420 BC, accession 08.258.22, catalogue entry, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogue description
- Amphora attributed to the Orvieto Painter, 56.171.1 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Terracotta amphora attributed to the Orvieto Painter, Chalcidian, ca. 540 BC, accession 56.171.1, catalogue entry, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogue description
- Apuleius, The Golden Asse (tr. William Adlington), Apuleius, The Golden Asse, translated by William Adlington (1566), Project Gutenberg eBook #1666, Project Gutenberg, Book V (the tale of Cupid and Psyches)
- Spiritual seekers reconstruct ancient Greek polytheism (Religion News Service, 7 March 2017), Religion News Service, “Spiritual seekers reconstruct ancient Greek polytheism”, 7 March 2017, Religion News Service, article text
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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