SUMMER SPECIAL: IRON MAN

IN WHICH: we delve into the life and stories of Hephaestus, the god of fire, bearer  of culture, architect and blacksmith to the gods. The child of dysfunctional immortals, he struggles to find a home and a family.

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Transcript

IRONMAN

There was a cartoon in The New Yorker few decades ago that I thought I remembered pretty much exactly, and when I went to The New Yorker cartoon bank online to look it up, I really had. I had a vivid memory of the cartoon and the caption. It shows a father and son visiting a museum and they're standing in front of an absolutely enormous sculpture of a Roman soldier. The sculpture just sort of looms over these two small figures. The father and son are looking up, and the father says “it was a time when men regularly performed feats of great valor, but were rarely in touch with their feelings.”

And I've been thinking about that cartoon while I've been getting ready to talk about Hephaestus. And I think the reason is that of all the gods and goddesses, there's something about Hephaestus that allows you to feel just a little more empathy towards him than the other gods.

Gods and goddesses - being immortal - it's not very good for your morality.  Because, when you’re going to live forever, you just do whatever you want. You don't have to answer to anyone. You never have any final reckoning of your life and what you've done with your life. You just live and and do what you want. And, as a result, the gods and goddesses very often behave quite outrageously to one another. And certainly to humans. 

And Hephaestus certainly has his share of unpleasant stories. But there's something about his overall character that I personally just feel a lot of empathy towards. 

So hello, I'm Tom Lee, and this is “The Odyssey Odyssey,” the podcast that retells the story of the Odyssey and all the stories that lead up to and away from and surround the Odyssey. 

And today, we're taking a little break away from the flow of the epic narrative. And we're just focusing in on stories about Hephaestus. Hephaestus was the subject of the story told by the Rhapsode Demodicus at the court of Alcinous. He told it to break up the tension in the middle of a sort of athletic game session.  It was the story of Hephaestus, married to the goddess Aphrodite, who was having an affair with the God Ares. 

But there's certainly a great deal more to say about Hephaestus. Or, as Philippe de Montebello, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for many years, he always referred to him as Hephaestus. And Philippe de Montebello spoke in very rich and plummy tones that I could not ever hope to imitate. So I will just stick to my pedestrian. Hephaestus. 

Hephaestus is the God of fire, as Zeus is the God of the air, and Poseidon is the God of the ocean. But Hephaestus is also the God of forges, and the God of volcanos. And I think more importantly, Hephaestus is himself an active blacksmith. He's a blacksmith and an architect, and he creates all manner of jewelry. He creates weapons for the gods and goddesses, and he creates the palace where the gods and goddesses live on Mount Olympus - he designs and builds that.  

And he also creates these sort of robots. These animals, men and women that function like real people, like servants. But in fact they are automata. They are completely manufactured by Hephaestus, an extraordinary example of ancient Greeks imagining the sort of science fiction future that we still imagine today. I think there something innate in humans that visualizes these living machines – From Robbie the Robot on “Lost in Space” to Alexa sitting on my desk. 

 And this idea of the blacksmith God is surprisingly universal. Almost every culture that has a mythology has a. God, who is a blacksmith, a creator God, the Yoruba people in Nigeria, have Ogun and in Ireland you have Lugh of the long arm, and also the juman blacksmith Chullain, who gives Chuchullain his name.  Bridget is the goddess of fire, but Luke is himself the blacksmith. In India, you have Vishvakarma who is the God of blacksmiths and also architecture. He builds fantastic palaces. And there are blacksmith gods in Egypt and Vietnam and Japan. 

And this kind of God  - God’s who are responsible for craft, for creating  -  they are sometimes known as a culture bearers. It's one thing to be the God of fire to sort of be the God of this elemental part of nature -  But then there's this whole realm of Gods who bring culture to human beings. They taught us the behaviors that we know. 

We’ve talked about Demeter, teaching humankind how to plant, giving us the knowledge of how to become farmers – And Hephaestus is the God who brought the craft of forging iron, and  smelting iron to humankind. And I love to think about this idea. People have been smelting iron for over 1500 years, -  I love to think about the first person who stopped and sort of said  “how do we know how to do this? Where did this come from? How did we learn this” - and a myth being created to answer that question.  Beyond the natural world, the  Gods give these amazing gift, these abilities.  It's like having a God for the gift of writing – Thoth in Egypt. In some cultures there are gods that gave the gift of piercing your ears or piercing your nose, or why we tattoo ourselves. These are that Immortals taught humans to do - So that explains that. 

And if you think about manipulating iron that comes from the Earth, Gaia mother Earth producing this iron and then human beings being able to shape, manipulate, use that iron for tools to better their own lives -  but also into weapons.It's an amazing sort of alchemy that the blacksmith does - turning iron into the power of weapons.

Another goddess connected with fire is Hestia.  She is one of the least known gods, but one of the most fascinating. I think.  She’s the sister of Zeus and Poseidon - she's the goddess of the hearth. She's the goddess who holds the fire in the home and basically keeps your house from burning down, which, if you think about it, when you're. Brought fire. This potentially incredibly destructive force. When you bring that into your home for your own benefit. That seems like something from the gods. 

And that idea that humans have fire at all, of course, comes from Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to these poor, weak, defenseless humans. And of course, Zeus was so enraged by this that he ordered Prometheus to be chained to the side of the Caucasus Mountains. And who you going to call to do that, but Hephaestus, the blacksmith of the gods.

In Aeschylus’s  play Prometheus Bound, the first character we see is Hephaestus, and he is hammering in the stakes into the chains that are going to bind Prometheus to the side of the mountain. And there's a character overseeing this, who's the personification of Strength, and he's egging Hephaestus on. And he says to him, “it was your treasure that he stole. The flowery splendor of all fashioning fire.”  That's Philippa Vellacott's, translation. And Hephaestus, even here, he says to Prometheus. “Alas, Prometheus. I weep for your sufferings…”.  So Hephaestus can be two things at once. He's the he's the force that's chaining Prometheus down. But he's also weeping for his suffering. 

And at this point, I should tell the story of Pandora, who was created by Hephaestus at Zeus's request as revenge for this theft of fire. But it's just so misogynistic,  - Hesiod tells how all women are descended from Pandora, ‘the ruinous tribe of women, the great affliction who live with mortal men….

The short version is that Prometheus had a brother, Epimetheus – they were twins – they were children of the first administration of gods – the Titans.  Pro-metheus means, foresight, or wisdom – looking ahead.  Epimemetheus is hindsight, or foolishness.

Zeus had Hephaestus create the first woman out of earth and water, and then all the fmale gods gave her gifts “Pan Dora” means all the gifts – and of course they were gifts like beauty, and seduction, and treachery….  And Zeus presents this beautiful first woman as a gift – not to Prometheus, the wise brother, but to Epimetheus, the foolish brother – and, well, hijinks ensue – all the evil in the world is the fault of the first womwn…..where have we heard that one before.

This is always one of the first myths kids learn in school – of all the fabulous myths that are out there, I’m not sure this one needs to get as much airtime as it does.

Anyway – back to Hephaestus.

Hephaestus is pretty strange. Kind of right from the get-go, there's a strong tradition that Hera gave birth to Hephaestus, but she did so entirely on her own. No one else was involved with this pregnancy. Certainly not Zeus. The story says that because Zeus was able to give birth to Athena out of his own head, which is another story for another day perhaps. But he had impregnated Metis, who was a nymph, and in order to prevent her having a child, he swallowed. Metis and then the child was born inside his head. I love telling the story to kids. Their eyes just fall out of their heads. 

As the child was born inside of Zeus's head, and because Athena was to be the goddess of war, she set to work creating her suit of armor inside her father's head. And he had this unbelievable headache and finally Athena burst forth. From Zeus's head, and she was fully grown and fully armed and ready for battle. 

There's another pretty widespread version of this story in which Zeus, in his agony, calls upon Hephaestus to come with his great acts and crack open Zeus's head and Athena pops out.  This is the version that you often see illustrated on pots, but that doesn't square with the idea that Athena was born first and Hephaestus is Hera’s revenge. 

Anyway. Hephaestus is lame. Hephaestus does not have that perfect, beautiful body of the gods that's constantly being referenced throughout the Odyssey. Whenever any good looking person appears, the brothers of Nausicaa, for example, they're instantly compared to the gods. “They were as splendid as the gods.”  But in form. Hephaestos was not like any of the other gods . He's almost always referred to as amphigoreus, and that means both feet are crooked. Amphi meaning both he has crooked feet and that is variously translated in different versions of the Homeric poems 

AT Murray refers to “the famous God of the two lame legs.” 

Robert Fitzgerald calls him “the great game legs.”

 Robert Fagles calls him “the famous crippled Smith.” 

Emily Wilson calls him “the famous limping God.”

Albert Cook refers to “the widely renowned double cripple”

 and WHD. Rouse calls him “the famous crookedshanked God.”

 And as early as 1614, George Chapman. Simply says he was “legged awry.” Which I kind of love. Chapman always has this great economy of words to really pack a punch, Hephaestus was “legged awry.” 

And because of this strange and ungod like appearance, we're told that his mother, Hera, threw him out of heaven. She was so disgusted with the ugliness of this baby that she threw him out of heaven. (What  was I saying about the god’s behavior?) 

And this is actually the first of two times that Hephaestus is going to be thrown out of Mount Olympus, and he tells this second story himself in the Iliad, not in the Odyssey, but in the Iliad. 

And there's a little bit of a back story that has to be explained. And you know me by now, gentle listener, I love a back story. 

The pivotal event of the Iliad is the murder of Patroclus, who is Achilles’s companion. I was in a classroom once and the teacher had told the class that Achilles and Patroclus were cousins. And I just looked at the teacher and she just looked back at me and shrugged. But if they were cousins, they were probably kissing cousins. Let's leave it at that for now. 

But Achilles has left the field due to a quarrel with Agamemnon. He is basically sulking while his fellow Greeks are dying in battle.  And all of his men, the murmydons, all of his men are also pulled out of the battle. He's actually hoping that the Greeks will suffer without him. 

And at a very low point in the battle he is convinced to allow Patroclus to entering the fight wearing Achilles’s armor, just seeing the sight of Achilles armor on the field, the theory goes, all of the Trojans will be so terrified to think that Achilles has returned to battle when they see his armour on Patroclus, that they'll all turn and run. And as Patroclus is heading out, dressed in Achilles armour, Achilles warns him essentially not to get carried away. “You're not really me, you're just wearing my armor. You won't be able to fight the way I can fight. Go out, scare them back behind the walls of Troy. And then come back – don’t get carried away…”

And Patroclus does go out. And, indeed, the Trojans are terrified and they turn and run as soon as they see him. And Patroclus is sort of swept up in this he gets a little high on this power that he has, and sure enough, he fights with Hector and ultimately  Hector kills him. Not only does he kill Patroclus, but he strips his body of his armor. And this is a terrible indignity. Worse, really than death. To have the enemy steal your armor. And it's not Patroclus's armour, Of course, it is Achilles’s armour. And Achilles - this is the one thing that's going to get Achilles back into the fight to revenge the death of Patroclus. But he has no armor, so the great, powerful hero goes to the edge of the sea and weeps and calls upon his mother. 

His mother, Thetis, is a water nymph, a sea nymph, and she is one of the hundreds of nymphs we talked about in episode 2, the children of. Oceanus, the grandchildren of the God of the sea. And she rises up out of the waves, and she comes to weeping. Achilles. And she says, tell mother everything. Tell Mother what's wrong? 

And he says I have no armor to fight the Trojans. My armor has been stolen, and she says I will go to Hephaestus. I will go to the forge of Hephaestus to get you the most splendid armour. And indeed, she does. 

In this version of the story. Hephaestus is not married to Aphrodite, as we hear in The Odyssey. Here he's married to another nymph named Charis. And there's a standard greeting that turns up a lot when Gods visit one another  - it's sort of like, ‘oh, we haven't seen you in so long. What do you want?’ 

 And Thetis admits she has come to ask this great favor to have Hephaestus make this armour for her son. And as he's preparing to set to work, Homer gives us this beautiful portrait of Hephaestus. He takes a sponge and he mops the sweat from his neck, and he mops his hairy chest and his thick arms. And then he walks on his crooked thin legs all around the forge and he has his automata – the robots - are there sort of helping him.

But he passes the time by telling fetus the story of his childhood, or remembering the story of his childhood because it was Thetis and another nymph, Eurynymne, who saved. Hephaestus, when he was thrown from heaven by his mother. They took him, presumably, as a baby, into a cavern under the ocean, and they kept him there in secret. He reminds Thetis how none of the other gods knew where he was. Only Thetis and Eurynyme. And it was in this cavern that he first began to experiment and teach himself blacksmithing and he would make fabulous jewelry of all different kinds, he made necklaces and brooches, and these gold omelets that sort of spiral around women's arms. And he stayed there underwater for nine years. 

And then the question is, how did he get back to heaven? You might know Robert Graves’svery celebrated book, “The Greek Myths,” which is a sort of encyclopedia of the God's deeds and stories and attributes.  And, Robert Graves is generally acknowledged as a genius who sometimes kind of made things up. And he tells the story that Hera happened to see Thetis wearing beautiful jewelry and wanted to know “where did you get it, darling?” And she admits that. Ohh, Hephaestus is here with us under the water and he makes the most fabulous ornaments. And because of this, Hera welcomes Hephaestus back to heaven.  Now, nowhere am I able to find any record of that, and I actually reached out to a couple of classical scholars, who just sort of shrugged and said, well, that sounds like Robert Graves being Robert Graves…”

But there is another story of how Hephaestus returned to heaven, and this survives almost nowhere in writing. But it does survive in art. In fact, the subject of Hephaestus's Return is sort of a common theme on a lot of Greek pottery, and this is just one of many instances where you see that the Greeks never got their religion canonized.  - Jews and Christians both canonized their sacred scriptures in different sort of councils. Some books of the Hebrew scriptures and some books of the Christian Bible were eliminated over time. And some were acknowledged as Canon. These are the books that we're going to stick with. These are the books that are going to explain everything - and a lot of the sort of contradictions one imagines were ironed out as the cannon was shaped. In 393 CE there was the Council of Hippo where  - sort of “no more bets,”  you know, no other texts were going to be admitted into the Christian Canon. 

So you could now really call that story of your religion the definitive one, -  and nothing like that exists in ancient Greece. That's why you have so many different stories of who is married to whom, who's the parent of this God or human or demigod and they very often contradict each other  - and it's it's kind of great. And it's also kind of madding. 

So, here’s the pot story. In ancient Athens, about 500 BCE, there was a sanctuary dedicated to Dionysis, and there was a theater there. Dionysus is the God of theater, and there were two shrines, and the shrines had paintings on the walls, frescoes. Now parts of the sanctuary are still there, but the shrines and the paintings, however, are all long gone.

 But Around 150 AD there was a Greek writer named Pausanias, who wrote basically a travel guide to Greece. He traveled all around Greece, and he gave meticulous reports of buildings, artworks, and natural scenery that he saw and this is published in Pausanius's guide to Greece  - and he saw those shrine paintings while they stioll exisated, and described them in his book and told the story that Hephaestus was furious for nine years, furious at his mother Hera, and determined to get revenge. 

Now,  if you have listened to the previous episode, this is going to sound very familiar. But he created these invisible chains. These spider web like chains that were incredibly strong, and he made a golden throne as a gift for Hera. But, as with his bed in the last episode, this throne was a trap. And when Hera sat in it, these incredibly strong and invisible chains that he had made dropped over her and she was trapped in this throne and Hephaestus absolutely refused to let her out - he would not release his mother from this trap. 

And the story says that finally, Dionysus, the God of wine, went to Hephaestus, hiding out in his underground grotto with Thetis and Eurynyme  - and Dionysus got him drunk. Dionysus, the God of wine and revelry. They had a great time, and Hephaestus got so drunk that Dionysus was able to convince him to come back to Mount Olympus and to free his mother, and this is celebrated in this painting. 

And there's another depiction of this same story that is incredibly famous. In 1844, there was an excavator, an Italian excavator named Alessandro Francoise. He was Italian, go figure,  and he was excavating a tomb in Chiusi, which is a long way from Rome. It's in central Italy. 

And the tomb had been built around 570 BCE, but by the time Alessandro Francoise got to it,  it had long since been looted. Probably not long after it had been built, the tomb had been looted by grave robbers. They took everything that was considered valuable at the time – they took all the gold and silver, but they completely ignored the terracotta pots that were in this tomb, and there was one enormous pot. It was a “volute crater,”, which is a great big pot that you would mix wine and water in for a party or a symposium. And this pot was smashed to pieces, which is how Signor Francois found it. You can imagine the tomb robbers of ancient times just knocking this thing over and leaving it there.

But now, this pot is sometimes called the “Rex Vasorum,” the king of all vases.  When it. Was all put together again. It had a whopping 270 figures on it, and 131 of them were identified by name. There's writing all over this pot. 

(I love the way  - this is a little bit like the way children will make an illustration and then sort of label everything -  Greek Potters love to sort of identify who's who in their pictures.)

The Potter and the painter actually, both their names are known, and that's pretty rare that we know the the identity of who made the pot and who painted the picture on the pot. This pot has become an incredibly important source of verifying a lot of these stories that never made it into print, including the story of “The Return of Hephaestus.”  He's always shown riding on a donkey, which indicates the really drunken revelry that’s underway, and Dionysus is leading him on, and there are always satyrs surrounding them, and the satyrs are ready for anything. And since Satyrs celebrate excess in every form, these satyrs are “unambiguously aroused.” Let's put it that way, (as is, by the way, the donkey).

And the vase has been reassembled with a few gaps that are sort of filled in with blank terracotta, but that's in Florence. That's at the museum archaeological in Florence, where you can see it.   (Or, of course, you can go to the webpage for this episode, whereever you have logged on from)

So, Hephaestus returns in triumph, but it it doesn't last that long because it gets thrown out of Olympus again. And this is another story that's told in the Iliad. And I sort of wonder, and some scholars even sort of wonder, is this is this two different stories or is this one story that got split into two? Was he thrown out because of his legs, or did the throwing out cause his legs to become misshapen? All of this is is a little contradictory from different versions. 

But it seems as if he was thrown out of Olympus two times and the second time he was thrown out by Zeus. And again, Hephaestus tells this story. This is early in the Iliad, and Hephaestus remembers this very domestic scene of Zeus and Hera and. They are sort of the mother of all dysfunctional families. Zeus and Hera are having an argument that is escalating out of control and Zeus is becoming incredibly violent. He's threatening to beat Hera -  and the language that is used indicates that this is not unusual. And Hera, who's sort of goading Zeus at first, she suddenly becomes very terrified of her husband - and Hephaestus steps in  - good son that his is - to break up the fight between mon and dad.

 And in order to inject a little levity into the scene, he tells the story of the second time he was thrown out of heaven, and that actually happened the last time he was trying to break up a fight between his mother and father. He stepped in to defend his mother, and Zeus was so enraged that he threw Hephaestus out of heaven. But this time he landed not in the ocean. He landed on the island of Lemnos, and the people of Lemnos cared for him and and brought him back to health and were very kind to him. And this is why, we are told, the sanctuary of Hephaestus was on the island of Lemnos, a very sacred place to Hephaestus. (In the story in the Odyssey, when he's pretending to go away so that he can catch Ares and Aphrodite in the act, he tells his wife the very believable story that he's going to see the people on Lemnos). 

Which brings us - inevitably - to Hartford, Connecticut.

We have a standard joke in our house that all roads eventually lead to Hartford. My husband is very bullish on the history of Hartford, and while Kevin Bacon might take six degrees to get to, Paul can usually get you to Hartford in no more than three. And in Hartford is the Wadsworth Atheneum the Art Museum named after Athena. The “Atheneum” rather than a “museum” named after the Muses.) And one of the jewels in the crown of the Wadsworth Collection, is a large painting by Piero di Cosimo. Called “The Finding of Vulcan on Lemnos” and Vulcan, of course, is the Roman name for Hephaestus. That's where we get the word volcano. And this is just a fantastic painting.

Piero di Cosimo was a contemporary of Michelangelo. He may have actually helped with the Sistine Chapel. And he has this reputation as being just eccentric. His pictures are all just a little strange, even by Renaissance standards that during the Renaissance he was considered to be sort of an outlier. We know from Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” that he was so afraid of fire he never wanted to cook anything.  So the story says that he would boil 50 eggs at a time, and would just eat hard boiled eggs all the time because he was terrified of fire. 

I guess it's sort of ironic that he painted Vulcan if he was afraif of fire…

But this is a fabulous and slightly bizarre picture. Vulcan is shown as sort of an adolescent, which hearkens back to that family Feud episode. But he's quite lithe. He doesn't look anything like the burly, sinewy Hephaestus that Homer describes, and he's sprawled out on the grass of Lemnos – it’s not hard to imagine his legs hace been broken, if they weren’t already “awry” And these nymphs in Renaissance garb have come to rescue him, and they're all smiles - kind of all smiles and breasts  - and you see the sort of details that Cosimo was famous for. Tremendous detail to flowers and the grass and the trees - and one of the nymphs is holding this little dog - It's just really strange and I'm going also going to put that on my website.

And there's one more Hephaestus story that I want to tell you, and this story is also sort of convoluted. There are many, many different versions of this. And they all kind of overlap and contradict one another, and there's a lot of names and some of the names get repeated. So I'm not even going to attempt to refer to the original sources and claim a scrupulously accurate retelling of the story  - I'll just give you my own sort of retelling of the story.

We've talked about how different wives are ascribed to Hephaestus, and there was a point when he was supposed to marry Athena and he was, of course, thrilled by this idea. But Athena, not so much.  Athena was, predictably,  repulsed by Hephaestus's ungod like body, but Hephaestus was not going to take no for an answer. 

In classic Greek style -  and I need to sort of euphemize my language here a little bit here so that Apple Podcast  doesn't flag me -  Hephaestus was so enthused by the idea of mating. With Athena that his life force escaped him. (You know what I'm talking about)  and landed on Athenas's thigh  - and Athena was so disgusted by this she took a little piece of  wool and she wiped this “life force” off, and dropped it out of heaven, where it landed on Mother Earth.

And that, boys and girls, is how Hephestus and Mother Earth gave birth to a son  - and his name was Erechtheus. The first great King of Athens. Athens, of course, is sacred to Athena. It bears her name and it's easy to imagine Athenians sort of asking the question where do we come from? How did we get here? How is it that all our family lineages  - as far back as anybody can remember -  everything centers around this place. Where did we come from? 

And there was one of these sort of primordial culture bearing figures, sort of a God. His name was Cecrops and he was said to be the first ruler of this place. And he gave people the knowlesge of reading and writing. He also taught people burial rights - what to do after someone had died. But when this child of Hephaestus and mother Earth was born erect thus. He simply rose up out of the ground and from him came all the future residents of the city of Athens, sacred to Athena. But of course the story is a little weirder than that because the child was actually half human and half snake. The lower part of his body was a serpent.

And this was so horrifying that Athena put this child into a box and gave the box to the three daughters of Cecrops. (I do Hope you're following along here)  and Athena told these three  women absolutely, positively do not open this box. 

Can you guess? 

They did, and they were so horrified by what they saw that they threw themselves off of the Acropolis, which seems a little extreme. But thus the baby Erechtheus was released from the box and went on to found the Great City State of Athens. 

So there you have. It Hephaestus,  Vulcan. Call him what you will, that's his story. 

I'm Tom Lee, and I always want to remind you that you can reach out and drop me a note. Tell me what you're thinking. Any questions that are on your mind again on the page for this website? There's a link that says send me a text and just remind you that comes without any of your personal information. I don't have your text number or your e-mail address or anything like that. I just get the note and I'd love to know what you're thinking.

So, until next time  - I'm Tom Lee -  thanks for listening.