The divine smith
Hephaestus appears in Book I as the peacemaker of Olympus: when Hera and Zeus quarrel, he reminds them of his own fall from heaven and makes them laugh. His lameness is both a joke and a sign of his difference from the beautiful gods, and his workshop is a place of extraordinary invention.
His greatest creation is the armour of Achilles in Book XVIII. The shield contains cities at war and at peace, fields, vineyards, herds, a dance floor, and the ocean around the rim. It is a whole world made by a god for a man who is about to die.
The net
In the Odyssey, Demodocus sings how Hephaestus caught Aphrodite and Ares in bed by weaving an invisible net around his own bed. The trapped lovers are exposed to the laughter of the gods, and Apollo asks Hermes whether he would like to be caught in such a trap. The story is comic, but it also shows Hephaestus’s power: the craftsman who cannot compete in beauty can still outwit the god of war.
Hephaestus is one of the poem’s most sympathetic gods. He is mocked, cuckolded, and physically disabled, and his response is to make things of unmatched beauty and cunning.
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