Hephaestus Cast from Heaven by Zeus
Catalogue ID: 02-olympian-gods/008-hephaestus-cast-by-zeus-iliad-1
Cycle: Olympian gods
Version line: Homeric / Apollodorean — Zeus casts Hephaestus for defending Hera
Sources: Homer, *Iliad* 1.590–594; Apollodorus, *Library* 1.3.5 (with Hera’s hanging after the storm against Heracles)
Source file: /workspace/greek-myth-catalogue/02-olympian-gods/008-hephaestus-cast-by-zeus-iliad-1.md
Characters
- Artemis — seizes him by the foot and hurls him from the threshold; earlier hangs Hera
- Hephaestus — cast out by Zeus for defending Hera; lands on Lemnos; tended by Sintians (Homer) / saved by Thetis (Apollodorus)
- Heracles — his storm-beset voyage triggers Zeus’s punishment of Hera (Apollodorus frame)
- Pallas — saves Hephaestus after the fall (Apollodorus)
- Sintians — Lemnians who care for the fallen god (*Iliad* 1)
Places
- Lycia — island of landing and rescue
- Olympus — starting point of the fall
- Troy — setting of Heracles’s voyage in the Apollodorean frame
Themes
Narrative
In *Iliad* 1, Hephaestus urges Hera not to quarrel with Zeus and recalls his own bitter lesson: once before, when he tried to help her, Zeus seized him by the foot and hurled him from the divine threshold. He fell all day; at sunset he landed on Lemnos, with little life left in him, and the Sintian men cared for him after his fall.
Apollodorus embeds this fall in a fuller Olympian quarrel. After Heracles took Troy and was at sea, Hera sent a storm against him. Zeus, enraged, hung Hera from Olympus (the *Iliad* itself remembers anvils bound to her feet). When Hephaestus came to her rescue, Zeus cast him out. He fell on Lemnos and was lamed in the legs; Thetis saved him. In this strand, therefore, the fall *causes* (or confirms) the lameness, and the motive is Zeus’s punishment of a son who sided with Hera—not Hera’s disgust at a lame infant.
The two Homeric memories (*Iliad* 1 and 18) are treated as separate version lines because agent, motive, landing place, and the relation of lameness to the fall all differ.