Lemnos, the Athenian Forge, and Vulcan

In cult Hephaestus was strongest where fire and craft mattered. The volcanic island of Lemnos was his mythic landing-place and a centre of his worship, and at Athens, a city proud of its craftsmen, he was honoured beside Athena as a patron of the technai; the well-preserved Hephaisteion overlooking the Agora, long miscalled the Theseion, stood in the quarter of the metalworkers and foundries. The Athenians told that Erichthonius, an early king, was born of Hephaestus's desire for Athena and the earth, making the smith-god a father of the Athenian line. The Romans identified him with Vulcan, an old Italic fire-god whose festival, the Volcanalia, sought to keep destructive fire away from the granaries at the height of summer.

Ancient tradition placed Hephaestus's workshop beneath active volcanoes, most famously Mount Etna in Sicily and the Aeolian island the Greeks and later Romans called Hiera or Vulcano, where the clang of his hammer and the Cyclopes' bellows were said to explain the mountain's smoke and tremors, a folk reading of real volcanic activity that passed almost unchanged into Roman belief about Vulcan. The philosopher Empedocles, who lived and wrote near Etna in the fifth century BCE, is said in a disputed later tradition to have died by throwing himself into its crater, and writers after him connected the mountain's fire with the smith-god's forge quite apart from any formal cult, a sign of how thoroughly the volcanic landscape of the central Mediterranean had been read through his myth.