Hephaestus is the maker among the Greek gods — lord of fire and the forge, patron of smiths, sculptors, masons, and every craftsperson who turns raw material into something new.

He was also the one Olympian who worked. Where the others were born to beauty and ease, Hephaestus was cast out of heaven — flung from the heights of Olympus, by his mother Hera in one telling and by Zeus in another, and left lame from the long fall. He dropped for a whole day and landed, at last, far from the halls of the gods. And there, in exile, he learned his craft. It is a fitting origin for a god of making: his worth was never handed to him. It was forged, at the anvil, with his own hands.

And what hands. From his workshop came the marvels the immortals themselves relied upon — the thrones and halls of Olympus; the armour of Achilles, with a whole shining cosmos hammered into its shield; the first woman, shaped from earth and water at the bidding of Zeus. He built handmaidens of living gold to help him at the bellows, tripods that rolled to the gods' feasts of their own accord, watchdogs of gold and silver that never aged. The most wondrous things in the Greek imagination were his work.

In the Homeric Hymn that bears his name, Hephaestus and grey-eyed Athena are the two who gave craft to humankind — who found mortals living in caves in the hills like wild animals, and taught them to build, to make, to shelter, to fill a home with things made well. Before the gods of craft, we were beasts in the dark. After them, we were makers.

In Athens his temple still stands above the Agora, looking down over the marketplace where makers once met to trade.