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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter IV: The Olympian Gods

Hermes, Hephaestus, Ares and Aphrodite: The Other Olympians

Hermes, Hephaestus, Ares and Aphrodite in Greek myth and cult, with Poseidon, Hera and Hestia: their births, symbols, chief myths and the twelve Olympians.

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Besides Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Artemis and Demeter, the twelve Olympian gods of Greece included Hermes, the messenger, trickster and guide of souls; Hephaestus, the lame smith of fire and craft; Ares, the god of war in its violence; and Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and desire, together with Poseidon, lord of the sea, Hera, queen of the gods, and Hestia or Dionysus. Their stories come from Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, and each also had a real cult with temples, festivals and local traditions.

Who Were the Twelve Olympians?§

The idea of a group of twelve gods is attested by the sixth century BCE: an Altar of the Twelve Gods was set up in the Athenian Agora in 522/521 BCE, and Herodotus used it as the point from which distances were measured. Which twelve, however, varied with time and place. The gods seated on the east frieze of the Parthenon are Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes and Dionysus. Other lists include Hestia, goddess of the hearth, who in Plato's Phaedrus stays at home while the other gods ride out. The popular modern story that Hestia gave up her seat to make room for Dionysus has no ancient source.

Hestia, eldest daughter of Kronos and Rhea, refused marriage to both Poseidon and Apollo, and Zeus granted her the centre of every house and the first portion of every sacrifice. She has almost no myths; her importance lay in cult, at the hearth of each house and city. The births and marriages of the Olympians are traced in Zeus, king of the gods.

Hermes: Messenger, Trickster and Guide of Souls§

Hermes was the son of Zeus and the nymph Maia, born in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, probably of the sixth century BCE, makes his first day a comic epic. Born at dawn, by midday he had killed a tortoise and made the first lyre from its shell; by evening he had stolen fifty cattle of Apollo, driving them backwards and wearing sandals of brushwood to confuse their tracks. He sacrificed two of the cows by the river Alpheus, dividing the meat into twelve portions, and then crept back into his cradle. Before Zeus he swore he was innocent, but he finally won Apollo's friendship by giving him the lyre and received in return the cattle and a golden staff, the forerunner of the caduceus, whose later symbolism is traced in the caduceus.

His name may come from herma, a heap of stones marking a road or boundary, and his oldest image was the herm, a square pillar with a bearded head and an erect phallus, set at doorways, crossroads and borders. Their mutilation in Athens in 415 BCE caused a political scandal. Hermes was the god of roads, travellers, merchants, heralds, shepherds, thieves and lucky finds, and as Argeiphontes, slayer of Argus, he freed Io. As Psychopompos he led the souls of the dead to Hades and brought Persephone back to her mother, as told in Demeter and Persephone; in the Iliad he guides old Priam through the Greek camp to ransom Hector's body. The Romans identified him with Mercury, and in Graeco-Egyptian thought he merged with Thoth to become Hermes Trismegistus, patron of the Hermetic writings; he is also invoked constantly in the Greek magical papyri.

Hephaestus: The Divine Smith§

Hephaestus was the god of fire, metalwork and craftsmanship. Hesiod makes him the son of Hera alone; Homer, of Zeus and Hera. He was lame, and Homer gives two accounts of a fall from Olympus. In one, Hera, ashamed of her crippled child, threw him into the sea, where the sea goddesses Thetis and Eurynome hid and raised him for nine years; in the other, Zeus flung him from heaven for taking Hera's side in a quarrel, and he fell for a whole day before landing on the island of Lemnos, where the Sintians cared for him. In revenge he sent his mother a golden throne that trapped her, and only Dionysus could bring him back to Olympus, drunk on a mule, to release her.

Hephaestus built the bronze houses of the gods and, in the Iliad, is served by golden maidens who can move and speak. At Thetis's request he forged the great shield of Achilles, decorated with the earth, sky and sea, a city at peace and a city at war. At Zeus's command he moulded the first woman, Pandora, from earth and water (see Prometheus and Pandora), and in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound he reluctantly chains Prometheus to the rock. His wife is Charis in the Iliad, Aglaia in Hesiod and Aphrodite in the Odyssey. His cult was strongest on Lemnos and in Athens, where his well-preserved Doric temple, the Hephaisteion, still stands above the Agora among the workshops of the smiths and potters. The Romans identified him with Vulcan.

Ares: The God of War§

Ares, son of Zeus and Hera, was the god of battle in its rage and slaughter. Homer is unflattering. In Book 5 of the Iliad, Athena guides the spear of Diomedes into Ares, who bellows as loud as nine or ten thousand men and flees to Olympus, where Zeus tells him that he is the most hateful of all the gods. The same book recalls that two giants once shut him in a bronze jar for thirteen months. He was attended by his sons Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Terror), by Eris (Strife) and by the war goddess Enyo.

Greeks associated Ares with Thrace, a land they thought wild and warlike, and his cult was relatively limited, though there were sanctuaries at Sparta, at Tegea and elsewhere, and a temple of Ares moved to the Athenian Agora in the Augustan period. The hill of the Areopagus in Athens was explained by a myth reported by Apollodorus, in which Ares was tried there by the gods for killing Poseidon's son Halirrhothius, who had assaulted his daughter. His children included the dragon of Thebes and Harmonia, his daughter by Aphrodite. Rome's Mars, by contrast, was a revered father of the Roman people, as described in Roman religion.

Aphrodite: Goddess of Love and Desire§

Aphrodite has two births. In Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BCE) she rose from the white foam (aphros) that gathered around the severed genitals of Ouranos, landing first at Cythera and then at Cyprus, as told in the Greek creation myth. In Homer she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and when Diomedes wounds her hand at Troy she runs weeping to her mother. Plato's Symposium turned the difference into philosophy, distinguishing a heavenly Aphrodite (Ourania) of the love of the soul from a common Aphrodite (Pandemos). Her oldest great sanctuary was at Paphos on Cyprus, where she was worshipped in the form of a conical stone, and many scholars trace her partly to the Near Eastern goddess Ishtar-Astarte, perhaps through Cyprus and Phoenicia.

Her power over desire was feared even by the gods; only Athena, Artemis and Hestia were immune, says the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, which tells how Zeus made her fall in love with the Trojan herdsman Anchises and bear Aeneas. She lent Hera her embroidered band of desire, won the golden apple in the Judgment of Paris by promising him Helen, and mourned Adonis, killed by a boar, whose death women lamented in the summer festival of the Adonia. The once-common claim of widespread temple prostitution in her honour at Corinth, based largely on Strabo, is now treated with considerable scepticism. The Romans identified her with Venus, the name given to the brightest planet.

Ares, Aphrodite and the Net of Hephaestus§

The most famous story joining three of these gods is the song of the bard Demodocus in Book 8 of the Odyssey. Aphrodite, wife of Hephaestus, slept with Ares in her husband's house, until Helios saw them and told the smith. Hephaestus forged chains as fine as cobwebs, invisible even to the gods, fixed them around his bed and pretended to leave for Lemnos. When the lovers lay down, the net closed on them, and Hephaestus called the gods to witness. The goddesses stayed away for modesty; the gods came and stood in the doorway, and "unquenchable laughter" rose among them. Poseidon offered to guarantee that Ares would pay compensation, and the lovers fled, Ares to Thrace and Aphrodite to Paphos.

Ancient allegorists read the episode as the union of strife and love, and it became a favourite of painters such as Tintoretto and Velázquez, whose Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630) shows the smith hearing the news.

Poseidon and Hera in Brief§

Two more siblings of Zeus complete the circle. Poseidon, lord of the sea, earthquakes and horses, carried the trident and was called Enosichthon, Earth-shaker. He was already prominent as po-se-da-o on the Linear B tablets of Pylos, and in myth he received the sea when the sons of Kronos drew lots. He lost Athens to Athena (see Athena, goddess of wisdom and war) and Argos to Hera, and his anger at Odysseus for blinding his son Polyphemus drives the Odyssey. The Isthmian Games were held in his honour. Hera, queen of the gods and patron of marriage, is treated with Zeus, but her great temples at Argos and Samos show that she was a major goddess long before epic made her a jealous wife.

Frequently asked questions§

Who are the twelve Olympian gods?§

A common list is Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and either Hestia or Dionysus. Ancient lists varied, and Hades, although a brother of Zeus, was not counted because he lived below the earth.

Why was Hephaestus married to Aphrodite?§

The Odyssey is the main source for the marriage and gives no reason for it. Later writers suggested that Zeus arranged it, and the pairing of the lame craftsman with the goddess of beauty became a classic image of an ill-matched marriage, though other sources give Hephaestus a different wife.

What is the caduceus of Hermes?§

It is the herald's staff, originally a wand with two intertwined loops or snakes, carried by Hermes as messenger of the gods. It is often confused with the single-snake rod of Asclepius, the true ancient symbol of medicine.

Sources and further reading§