Number five in the new serie on greek mythology.
Today I finished: 'HEPHAISTOS, God of the flames'
Background info from wikipedia:
Hephaistos (Ancient Greek: Ἥφαιστος) or Vulcanus (Latin) is a figure from Greek mythology. He is the god of forging, fire and artisans and he is a blacksmith of the gods. According to some sources (Homer, et al.) He was the son of Zeus and Hera, according to others (Hesiod) he was only the son of Hera.
The Romans equated him with their god Vulcanus (also called Mulciber). He was married to Aphrodite, but Aphrodite deceived him with her lover Ares, the war god. From Ares she got a child named Harmonia.
Mythology:
He had strong arms, like every blacksmith, and underdeveloped legs. Hephaistos was also still limping. In Homer's' Iliad his appearance with the gods awakens' Homeric laughter '. There are two explanations for his failure. According to the one, Hephaistos was present in a marital dispute between his parents, and when he mingled to defend his mother, his father took him by the leg and threw him down from the Olympus. A people from Thrace, the Saints, who had landed on Lemnos with a migration (where Hephaistos had come down at his fall), he cared for but he kept limping.
The other version wants Hephaistos to be born in limb and that out of shame Hera decided to keep his birth hidden and to throw him down from the Olympus. He landed in the ocean, where he was fished by Tethys and Eurynome who raised him in a deep dark cave near the sea. When he had grown up, he decided to avenge himself by giving his mother a golden throne that he had forged. But when she took her place, she was suddenly chained to it, and no one except Hephaistos could deliver her. And so, with artifice, Hephaistos returned to the Olympus to liberate Hera. Both above stories can be found in the Iliad.
It is said that Zeus, in order to get on good terms with Hephaistos after his return to the Olympus, decided to give him Aphrodite as a wife. Although he was ugly himself, Hephaistos always had handsome women: apart from Aphrodite, mention is made of Charis and Aglaea, the youngest of the three Graces. Of the sons of Hephaistos are especially the Argonaut Palaemon, the sculptor Ardalus, the robber Periphetes, who was killed by Theseus, and Erichthonios known.
