For much of his early life, Hephaestus had no love for Olympus, particularly Hera. When he had the chance to give as good as he got, he did.

Hephaestus never forgave Hera for using him for throwing practice, so he created a gorgeous throne and sent it anonymously to the Queen of Olympus. Stumped by her secret Santa, Hera sat down on the mysterious gift. What happened next depends on the author; Pausinias says Hera was bound by invisible fetters, while Pseudo-Hyginus relates that she was hung in the air. Either way, she was stuck for three days.

Hephaestus didn’t just take his revenge on Hera. Enraged at Aphrodite’s infidelity with Ares, he forged a gossamer-thin net that actually weighed the Olympian equivalent of several tons, pinning the lovers in flagrante delicto. He then called all the gods to come laugh at the pair (if this sounds like a relatively mild punishment, in his play “Medea,” Euripides explains that mocking laughter was one of the worst insults of the ancient Greek world).

Proving that he could be as vicious as any on Olympus, Hephaestus also gave Harmonia, the bastard daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, a necklace that brought serious misfortune to its wearer. GreekMythology.com lists not only Harmonia, but Jocasta, Seleme, Eriphyle, and Phyallus as victims of the necklace.

As wife material, Hephaestus was well aware that Aphrodite was the goddess of love, sex, and beauty, but had no idea she was also the goddess of all-consuming black holes of emotional insecurity. This is the same goddess that set off the Trojan war to win a beauty contest, ordered Pysche, her future daughter-in-law, to literally go to hell for the sole purpose of making her even more pretty, and killed Hippolytus because he was asexual. Yikes.

At the same time, Aphrodite wasn’t an idiot; she knew she was a pawn in the Hephaestus-Hera drama and was not about to go quietly into an arranged marriage she didn’t want. And she let everybody know it: Anchises, Adonis, Boutes, Dionysus, Hermes, Phaethon, Poseidon and, most famously, Ares were all her extramarital lovers.

For his part, Hephaestus was painfully aware he wasn’t beautiful and so tried to earn Aphrodite’s heart by making her all sorts of beautiful things, including the famous girdle that made her even more desirable (via Theoi). While she took every bauble he made, Aphrodite was never won over; not only did Hephaestus and Aphrodite not have children (via Mythopedia), “The Odyssey” says that the smith god offered to give Aphrodite her single-lady freedom provided he got her dowry returned.

However, Hephaestus was no incel. Homer relates that he later married Aglaia (also called Charis) and fathered many children.

You may have the idea that all 12 Olympians were given equal due, but that isn’t really so. While the Greek, and later Roman, worlds were keen to stay on the gods’ good side, the reach of some deities was restricted.

As the god of fire, smiths, and craftsmen, the earthly sect of Hephaestus began and ended at the door of the smithy or workshop; poets or sailors would have no reason to worship a god of the forge. That being said, the entire Aegean island of Lemnos, the spot on Earth where Hephaestus crash landed, was considered so sacred to the god that its ancient capital was named Hephaestia in his honor. According to Herodotus in “The Histories,” Lemnos was originally the domain of the Pelasgians, a sort of catch-all ethnonym for the pre-Greek population of the region, hinting at just how old Hephaestus/”A-pa-i-ti-jo” is.

There seems to be only two gods that every Greek worshipped. The first was Zeus, whose epithet Panhellenios (“of all the Greeks”) gives a good hint of his popularity as King of the Gods. The second, ironically enough, was Hephaestus’ wife, Aphrodite. WorldHistory.org notes that far beyond her worship among the Greek populace, Aphrodite was also the official state goddess of several cities. Her appeal high and low is reflected in her form of “Aphrodite Pandemos,” literally “Aphrodite of all the people.”

Like Aphrodite, the other Olympians may not have particularly liked Hephaestus, but they certainly liked the things he made. In fact, the Greek gods could not have reached their positions of power without Hephaestus. In several myths where the gods engage in battle, from the Titanomachy to the Aloadae, many of the weapons used were made by Hephaestus. In the Greek mythos, if there is a weapon or item particularly fabulous or fantastical, there is a good chance Hephaestus made it.

Whether at his anvils on Olympus or at his summer home under the volcano of Mount Etna in Sicily, the Greek god of the forge made use of his time. He crafted automatons (think robots) to help him move around, the thunderbolts of Zeus (as well as his the scepter and aegis) the winged helmet of Hermes, and the chariot used by Helios and Apollo (via Mythopedia.com). He made the rattle Herakles used to spook the Stymphalian birds, the bow of the love god Eros, the arrows of Apollo and Artemis, plus all the (non-trappy) thrones of the Olympians, and even their individual palaces. The god was a prodigy.

And it wasn’t just gods that Hephaestus equipped. Homer records the scepter of authority used by not-father-of-the-year Agamemnon is certified Hephaestus-made, as is the cuirass of Diomedes. He was also the creator of Talos, a bronze giant that guarded Crete. This was a god who helped.

Curiously, the image of a lame smith god is very common. Aside from Hephaestus/Vulcan, there was Wayland the Smith of the Germanic-speaking people. In Egypt, the creator-craftsmen god Ptah was described as a dwarf (not particularly disabled, but still “othered”). This has led several researchers to theorize that their disability is in fact a mythologised real-world danger associated with Bronze Age metallurgy: arsenicosis.

According to a study from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, ancient forgemasters would, in times when tin wasn’t available, substitute it with arsenic in the production of bronze. Blacksmithing is obviously dangerous and always has been, what with flames, shooting sparks, and molten metal, but Bronze Age smiths made it worse by unknowingly using substances that were toxic, particularly if vaporized into the air through an open forge and inhaled.

Arsenic is poisonous, and can cause nerve damage that can result in weakness, numbness, and pain, among other symptoms. Chronic exposure to arsenic can also result in a variety of cancers, particularly of the skin. With this in mind, mythologists infer that ancient smiths probably had a host of unique physical maladies and disfigurements that would eventually be associated with smithing gods like Hephaestus and Wayland, even long after bronze was phased out in favor of iron.