Characters
- Artemis — casts the newborn; trapped by the golden/adamantine chair; finally freed
- Dionysus — only god Hephaestus trusts; intoxicates him and leads him to Olympus
- Hephaestus — cast out by Hera; crafts the trapping throne; returns drunk under Dionysus’s escort
- Olympian gods — plead in vain for Hera’s release before Dionysus succeeds
Places
- Athens, sanctuary of Dionysus — where Pausanias saw the painting of the return (narrative frame for the legend)
- Olympus — place of the casting, the trapping of Hera, and the return
Themes
Narrative
One Greek legend, Pausanias reports while describing paintings in the sanctuary of Dionysus at Athens, runs as follows. When Hephaestus was born, Hera threw him down from heaven. In revenge he sent her a gift: a golden chair fitted with invisible fetters. As soon as Hera sat, she was held fast. Hephaestus refused to listen to any of the other gods who begged him to free her—except Dionysus. In Dionysus he placed the fullest trust; after making him drunk, Dionysus brought him up to heaven, and the craftsman at last released his mother.
Hyginus preserves a closely related sequence: Hephaestus makes thrones for the gods but an adamantine one for Juno (Hera) that hangs her in the air; summoned to free her, he denies he has a mother; Father Liber (Dionysus) brings him back intoxicated, and only then does he perform the filial duty. (Hyginus adds a further bargain involving Minerva that belongs to another episode and is not required for this entry.)
The story explains both the reconciliation of mother and son and Dionysus’s special intimacy with Hephaestus in Attic art: the wine-god succeeds where force and ordinary persuasion fail.