Reading the Iliad // Hephaestus

We’re looking at Hephaestus today. He is one of the gods, so if you’ve seen my post on Achilles, you’d know that I have a lot against them. But Hephaestus, apart from a very cool name, is actually quite a decent character. He’s obedient to his mother, but probably resentfully and reluctantly so. He’s a master craftsman, a god who truly creates, especially if you compare him with the rest of the gods. He doesn’t meddle in the war as the others do, but when he’s in action, he’s extremely powerful. I’ll show you a few scenes where Hephaestus appear in the Iliad and explain why I think so.

Hephaestus is introduced to us in Book 1. At the risk of repeating myself from my first Iliad blog, I have to mention this scene again. Because Agamemnon refused Chryses’ ransom for his daughter, Apollo sent a plague on the Greek army. When the reason behind the plague was revealed and the solution was proposed, Agamemnon had a massive argument with Achilles. By the end, the plague left the Greeks, but so did Achilles. As a result, Zeus and his wife Hera also had a massive argument.

When Hera backed down from this quarrel, Hephaestus came up to comfort his mother. Book 1 ends with a surprisingly delightful domestic scene among the gods. Hephaestus said mother don’t be so angry, and he told a little story to make her laugh. Apparently, once Zeus,

“… he seized me by the foot and hurled me from the threshold of Olympus. I flew all day and, as the sun sank, I fell, all the life knocked out of me…”

And it worked. Hera smiled. Hephaestus didn’t just want to please his mother,

Then Hephaestus went on to serve the rest in turn, beginning from the left, with sweet nectar which he drew from the mixing bowl; and a fit of helpless laughter seized the blessed gods as they watched him bustling up and down the hall.

I love this scene. After all the proud and self-important men and gods fighting angrily, here’s someone whose words are sweet and whose actions are basically serving others in good humour. What a contrast. From this point on, I paid special attention to Hephaestus.

There was a detail in that scene that I didn’t mention in my first video. When the feast finished, all the gods went back to their houses,

… that the famous lame god Hephaestus with his supreme skill had built for them.

Two things here: he was lame and he was skilful in building things.

I didn’t know how special this made Hephaestus when I first read it, but now I’ve finished the Iliad, I can look back and say that Hephaestus WAS special. Because, first of all, no other god had any physical defect let alone disability. The gods often swooped down from Mount Olympus like hawks. Homer drew my attention repeatedly to Hephaestus’ physical difficulty. He was called “the famous lame god”.

He limped, but he was nimble enough on his stunted legs…
he… came limping from the forge.
Hephaestus moved unsteadily…

All the gods were perfect. Hephaestus was not.

Secondly, no other god had an occupation, they didn’t do any work. They watched the battlefield idly and when they felt like it, they meddled with the Trojan war. Hephaestus, in contrast, was referred to as a craftsman, a bronze smith and a blacksmith. These are the descriptions from the book. And I want to add, a magician or a scientist. I’ll explain in a few minutes. He worked. We see him at work and we see the final products of his work. Among all the battle narratives, it stands out to me as highly unusual.

In passing comments in various places, we see a few things that were made by Hephaestus: the Greek warrior Diomedes’ amour, goddess Hera’s bedroom with a special secret lock, and the aegis belonging to Zeus himself. There was also a slightly strange gift that Hera promised a god called Sleep. If you make Zeus fall asleep, I’ll give you

“… a beautiful chair, imperishable, golden, which the lame god Hephaestus, my own son, will make and finish for you, with a footstool underneath it, on which you could rest your gleaming feet as you dine.”

I would hesitate to get on the wrong side of Zeus for a chair. Sleep seemed to think the same, but he agreed to help Hera for the price of “one of the younger Graces”.

I find the whole conversation between Hera and Sleep fascinating. First of all, why do some gods have a name like Zeus and Hera, some are referred to by their function, like Sleep, Dawn and Delusion. And secondly, who are the younger Graces? Who are the older Graces? How many of them are there?

Hephaestus appeared in passing comments here and there and came back to the narrative for a major role in Book 18. By Book 18, Patroclus was killed and Achilles’ armour was taken by Hector. Before Achilles could go back onto the battlefield to make his revenge, there was the very practical problem of Achilles missing his shield and armour. Achilles’ mother the goddess Thetis went to “the famous blacksmith” house to ask for “a fine set of armour”.

And following Thetis, we get to see inside the fabulous and extremely fascinating palace of Hephaestus.

She found Hephaestus hard at work and sweating as he bustled about at the bellows in his forge. He was making a set of twenty tripods to stand round the walls of his well-built hall. He had fitted golden wheels to all their feet so that they could run off to a meeting of the gods and return home again, all self-propelled – an amazing sight.

It’s an amazing sight indeed and it’s so unexpected I almost feel a shift in the literary genre. Is this still an epic poem? It reads like a scene in a sci-fi or fantasy novel. That’s why I said Hephaestus was not just a craftsman, he was a magician craftsman.

Those tripods were not the only artificial intelligence in his house. Something more stunning was to come:

Waiting-women hurried along to help their master. They were made of gold, but looked like real girls and could not only speak and use their limbs but were also endowed with intelligence and had learned their skills from the immortal gods.

There were also bellows in his forge that blew all on their own and knew how strong and in which directions to blow without being handled by Hephaestus. And he made all of these, how clever. I have higher respect for him than all the other gods.

He made a magnificent shield for Achilles with bronze, tin, gold and silver with his automatic bellows. Homer spent almost four pages describing the decoration on this shield. It’s very unusual to have this lengthy description I’m really curious about its purpose. There were earth and sea, stars in the sky. There were two towns full of people, with weddings and a murder trial in one town, and sieges and battles in the other. There were people ploughing and reaping, grape picking, cattle-herding and doing other works in the field. There were men and women singing and dancing.

How big was the shield?! And the variety of scenes was not all that’s amazing. The decoration themselves were not static images – the farmers, the cattle, the dancing people, everything on there moved!

When Thetis visited Hephaestus’ palace, we don’t only get to admire his amazing craftsmanship, we also get to hear another secret revealed. Do you remember what we see in Book 1, where Hephaestus was a sweet son to Hera? Maybe he was not as simple and submissive as he appeared. When he heard Thetis came to visit him, he said,

“Thetis here? The very goddess whom I revere and honour for saving me in my hour of distress when my mother, the bitch, wanted to get rid of me because I was a cripple and threw me out of the skies into the sea! How I would have suffered then, if the sea-goddesses, Thetis and Eurynome daughter of Ocean with its circling stream, hadn’t taken me to their heart… I must certainly repay her for saving me.”

He was clearly resentful of what Hera did, if not in her face, definitely behind her back. It shed a different light on my reading of the incident in Book 1.

It also shed light on Hera’s character. I do not like her from the beginning to the end. If what Hephaestus said was true, that she tried to get rid of him because he was crippled, how could she have the cheek to call him “my child” when she had a need for him in battle and said, “Into action, little club-foot god, my child! It’s you we’ve been counting on to deal with Scamander in this fight.” and ordered him to do this and do that. We see how powerful Hephaestus was in this scene. He burnt up everything on the plain, the very ground was dried up by his fire. The River was literally boiling. Another thing about the Iliad I have no chance to mention is the vivid metaphors. Here’s one example,

As a cauldron is brought rapidly to the boil by a roaring fire and dry logs burning underneath, and melts down the fat of a well-fed pig while the fat spits up all around — so his lovely stream was consumed by fire and its waters boiled.

When Hephaestus defeated Scamander without a sweat, Hera changed her mind and said,

“Enough, Hephaestus, glorious child! It is not right to ill-treat a god like this merely to help mortals.”

You Hera are the worse culprit ill-treating gods and helping mortals!

Throughout the whole scene where Hephaestus fought the River Scamander, Hephaestus didn’t say a word. He silently obeyed his mother to the letter. Remembering his words to Thetis earlier, I wonder if that silent obedience was out of resentment rather than love?