Characters
- Achilles — Thetis’s son; occasion of her visit (frame)
- Aglaea — Hephaestus’s wife who greets Thetis in the surrounding scene
- Artemis — mother who casts him from heaven to hide his lameness
- Eurynome — Oceanid; co-rescuer and foster mother for nine years
- Hephaestus — lame smith-god; cast out by Hera; sheltered by Thetis and Eurynome
- Pallas — silver-footed Nereid; receives and fosters him; later guest seeking armor
- Tethys — father of Eurynome; his stream borders the secret cave
Places
- Hephaestus’s bronze house — later home where he tells the story
- Hollow cave by Ocean — nine-year forge-refuge with Thetis and Eurynome
- Olympus — place from which Hera casts Hephaestus
Themes
Narrative
When Thetis comes to Hephaestus’s bronze house to ask for new armor for Achilles, the smith-god recalls why he owes her lasting gratitude. Hera, he says, cast him from heaven because she wished to hide him—her own son—seeing that he was lame. He fell far, and would have suffered terribly, had not Thetis and Eurynome, daughter of Ocean, received him into their bosom. For nine years he dwelt with them in a hollow cave by the stream of Ocean, fashioning elaborate work—brooches, spiral armbands, cups, and necklaces—while none of the gods or mortals knew his whereabouts except the two goddesses who saved him.
In this Homeric strand, lameness is the *reason* for the fall: Hera rejects the imperfect child. The landing is into the sea (or a cave by Ocean), not onto Lemnos, and the fosterage is long and secret. Pausanias’s brief notice that Hera threw him down at birth belongs to the same maternal-rejection family and is often linked in art and later storytelling to the golden-throne revenge (see 009), but the *Iliad* 18 speech itself stops at the rescue and the debt to Thetis.