Vulcan (Latin Volcanus) was the Roman god of fire, both the destructive fire that consumes cities and the useful fire of the smith's forge. His cult was ancient at Rome, ascribed by tradition to the earliest kings, and his name may be pre-Latin. Identified with the Greek Hephaestus, he took on that god's character as the divine craftsman, lame smith of the gods, maker of thunderbolts and armour, but his Roman worship kept its own strong focus on fire as a danger to be appeased and kept away. In myth he was reckoned a son of Jupiter and Juno and, in the Greek-derived stories, husband of Venus; older Italian tradition paired him with the fire-goddess Maia or Stata Mater, who checks fire. Where Hephaestus was chiefly the artisan, Vulcan was above all the power of the flame that must be honoured lest it destroy.
Etruscan religion, which shaped so much of early Roman cult, provides the clearest evidence for Vulcan's pre-Latin roots: the Etruscan smith-god Sethlans appears on engraved bronze mirrors and is named among the regions of the divine sky mapped on the Piacenza Liver, a bronze model used for liver-divination discovered in 1877, where he occupies a position in the northern, more ill-omened sector of the celestial scheme the Etruscan haruspices consulted. The identification of Sethlans with Vulcan, generally accepted by scholars of Etruscan religion, suggests that Rome's fire-god arrived, at least in part, through the same Etruscan channel that shaped so much of early Roman kingship and ritual.