Hephaestus

Thrown down by Zeus

In the first book of the Iliad, Homer’s poem of the Trojan War, Zeus and Hera quarrel in front of the other gods. Their son Hephaestus tries to end it. He warns his mother not to provoke Zeus, and then he explains why.

Once, he says, Zeus seized him by the foot and threw him over the threshold of heaven. He fell for a whole day. At sunset he struck the island of Lemnos with little life left in him. The Sintians, the people there, found him and cared for him.

Hephaestus then goes round the hall pouring wine for the gods, a cupbearer’s job. The gods laugh to see the limping smith serving them, and the quarrel fades. Here the fall is a memory he uses to stop another family fight.

Thrown away by Hera

Seventeen books later in the same poem, Hephaestus tells the sea goddess Thetis a different story. Hera, he says, wanted to hide him because he was lame, so she threw him away.

Thetis and another sea goddess, Eurynome, caught him. They kept him for nine years in a cave with the stream of Ocean flowing all around it. Hidden from gods and mortals, he made brooches, spiral bracelets, rosettes and necklaces.

The two accounts cannot be joined without changing them. In one, Zeus throws him. In the other, Hera does. In the first he lands on Lemnos, and in the second the sea goddesses catch him. Homer keeps both stories.

Lame before the fall, or after it?

Other writers add more versions. Apollodorus, whose Library retells the Greek myths, says Hera bore Hephaestus without a father. Zeus threw him out because he defended Hera while she was hanging in chains. He landed on Lemnos, hurt his legs and was rescued by Thetis. Pausanias, a Greek traveller who described the places he visited, says more simply that Hera threw him down when he was born.

The versions also disagree about his lameness. In the eighteenth book of the Iliad, Hephaestus is already lame, and Hera rejects him for it. In Apollodorus, the fall causes the injury. One tradition makes his disability the reason he was thrown out. The other makes it the lasting mark of being thrown out. Neither version can cancel the other.

The golden chair

Every version pairs rejection with rare skill. His own family threw Hephaestus away, yet no other god could make what he made. Pausanias records the story that brings these two facts together.

Hephaestus sent Hera a golden chair. Its bonds could not be seen, and they closed on her when she sat down. The gods begged him to free her, but he refused to release her or to come back to Olympus, the home of the gods. Force was useless against a device that only its maker understood.

Dionysus, the god of wine, succeeded where the others failed. Hephaestus trusted him. Dionysus got him drunk and led him back to heaven. Ancient art often shows this return as comic, with the smith arriving in a procession. It also changes his standing. He does not creep back to ask forgiveness. The gods have to bring him back, because his craft has left even Hera, their queen, helpless.

What the chair changed

The story does not say that his family became kind, or that his old injury healed. Hera was freed, and Hephaestus took his place among the gods again. What changed was who depended on whom. The child once thrown away as unwanted came back as the only one who could undo his own work.

Pausanias saw the return painted in the old sanctuary of Dionysus, his sacred ground near the theatre at Athens. The scene hung among other pictures of Dionysus’s power. Pentheus and Lycurgus were shown punished for resisting him, and Ariadne was shown left behind by the hero Theseus before Dionysus came. In this scene the god of wine plays a healing part. He bridges the hostility between mother and son and brings the smith home to the family of the gods.

The story of his fall has no single fixed form. Whether Zeus or Hera threw him, and whether he was lame before or after, he survives through people outside Olympus who care for him and through the work of his hands.