Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In the song Demodocus sings before Odysseus, Aphrodite is already Hephaestus’s wife when Ares seduces her. The smith has house, bed, and marital claim; the invisible bonds are a husband’s revenge, and Poseidon’s surety is an adulterer’s fine. That Homeric premise—lame craftsman wed to the goddess of desire—shapes later handbooks and vase-painting: the marriage explains both the comedy of the net and the pathos of mismatched partners, beauty bound to toil and fire. Yet Homer himself is not single-minded. In *Iliad* 18 Hephaestus’s wife is Charis (Grace), who receives Thetis in the bronze house; Hesiod’s *Theogony* names Aglaia, youngest of the Charites, as Hephaestus’s bride among the settled divine marriages. Classical tradition thus holds two olympian household lines: Aphrodite as wife (chiefly *Odyssey* 8 and its reception), and Charis/Aglaia as wife (chiefly *Iliad* and Hesiod). They are not casually fused. The Aphrodite marriage supplies the adultery plot and Lemnos–Cyprus geography of the lovers’ flight; the Charis marriage supplies a Grace in the forge-hall without scandal. Apollodorus and Attic myth keep Hephaestus’s frustrated desire for Athena separate again—seed of Erichthonius, not of a wedding. This entry records the Aphrodite–Hephaestus union as a Homeric olympian marriage with a clear Hesiodic/*Iliadic* alternative, and points the net-song and Athena attempt to their own files.