Hephaestus

Hephaestus was cast down from Olympus for his deformity and labours at his forge beneath a volcano. That same forge produces the craft that gives him his most famous act of revenge. In the Odyssey, the bard Demodocus sings of Hephaestus's marriage to Aphrodite and of the god Ares, who becomes her lover behind Hephaestus's back. Warned by Helios, who sees everything from the sky, Hephaestus does not confront the pair directly. He forges chains finer than a spider's web, invisible and unbreakable, and rigs them around his own marriage bed before pretending to leave for Lemnos. Ares and Aphrodite, believing themselves alone, are caught fast the moment they lie down together, unable to move. Hephaestus summons the other gods to witness the humiliation rather than punishing the pair by force, and Homer's telling turns the episode into open laughter among the gods rather than tragedy, Poseidon eventually persuading Hephaestus to release the pair. The scene is often read as comic entertainment within its own poem, but it is also the fullest surviving picture of Hephaestus using the one weapon no other god commands, his own smithcraft, to answer betrayal with cleverness rather than strength.

The atlas records Hephaestus's veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult, and the clearest concrete evidence of that standing is still standing itself. The Hephaisteion, a Doric temple on the hill of Agoraios Kolonos overlooking the Athenian Agora, was built in the fifth century BCE and dedicated jointly to Hephaestus and Athena, patrons of craft and metalwork, in a district of the city where smiths and metalworkers actually worked. Unlike almost every other major temple of classical Greece, it survives today essentially intact, its columns, roof and much of its sculptural decoration still in place, a state of preservation owed in part to its later conversion into a Christian church, which protected the structure through the centuries when so many pagan temples were quarried for building stone. That same long afterlife left the building carrying the wrong name for much of the modern era: nineteenth-century antiquarians, reading its sculpted metopes as scenes from the life of the hero Theseus, called it the Theseion, a name still attached to the surrounding metro station and neighborhood in Athens today even though archaeological study later corrected the identification back to Hephaestus's own temple. Where Hephaestus's own myth gives him a body that does not match the Olympian ideal, the temple built in his name has outlasted the temples of gods whose myths gave them none of his disadvantages, and it did so for so long that observers eventually forgot whose temple they were even looking at.