Hephaestus is unusual among the Olympians in being physically imperfect: he is lame, and in one account cast from Olympus for it, in another lamed by the fall. Rather than a mere flaw, his lameness reads as the mark of the smith, a recurring figure across ancient societies in which the metalworker, indispensable and slightly set apart, is imagined as crippled, and comparative study links him to other lame or wounded smith-gods of the eastern Mediterranean. His works are the great artefacts of myth: the armour of Achilles, the aegis and the thunderbolts of Zeus, the golden automata that assist him, and Pandora, the first woman, moulded on the gods' orders.
Hephaestus does not appear plainly by name in the Linear B tablets, and scholars debate whether Bronze Age Greece already worshipped him under this name or whether his cult crystallised later around older ideas about lame, marginal smith-craftsmen found across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Archaic and early Classical vase painters loved a single comic scene from his myth, the Return of Hephaestus: having been thrown from Olympus by Hera and settling among mortals as a smith, he takes revenge by sending her a golden throne rigged with invisible bonds, and the only god who can persuade him to release her is Dionysus, who gets him drunk and leads him back to Olympus riding a mule, a scene painted on hundreds of surviving vases.