The population of Attica, which was largely industrial, worshipped Hephaistos with considerable zeal, and here and there in other parts of Greece proper he was honoured; Crete, always backward in classical times, apparently never reverenced him at all.
In Homer, he is a fully accredited Olympian, a son of Hera. Homer does not say who his father is, but in Hesiod he is the child of Hera only, a counter-miracle to the miraculous birth of Athena. In Homer, he is rather a figure of fun, at whose clumsy activity the gods laugh unquenchably when he waits at table. He is lame from birth, and Hera was so ashamed of his deformity that she cast him out of heaven, whereupon Thetis and Eurynome daughter of Okeanos caught him, and he lived with them nine years. Or—the two accounts are three-quarters the length of the Iliad apart—Zeus cast him out when he interfered in a quarrel between his parents. On that occasion he alighted on Lemnos, after falling all day, and was kindly received by the Sinties, as Homer calls the natives.
But his usual workshop was neither with the sea-goddesses nor in Lemnos, but in heaven, and the Greek poems are full of descriptions of the marvellous things he wrought, such as statues which would move of themselves, tripods which had the same wonderful power, immortal and impenetrable armour, all very natural things to be ascribed to him, seeing that he is foreign, and the Greeks of that day were but poor metallurgists compared to the Mediterranean peoples they lived among, and whose skill plainly had, to their eyes, not a little magic about it.
Later authors, Kallimachos, for example, and Vergil, liked to portray him in an underground forge with his soot-blackened workmen, the Kyklopes, about him, endlessly busy with divine tasks—thunderbolts for Zeus, arrows for Artemis, arms for some favoured hero.
Apart from this, there were also stories told of him in connexion with the birth of Athena, the affair of Erichthonios, and the scandalous behaviour of Aphrodite (narrated by Demodokos in Book Eight of the Odyssey).
In Rome, he was very inappropriately identified with Volcanus (Vulcan); for, as we have seen, Hephaistos was a smith-god in Greek tradition, where he was hardly remembered in any other capacity, whereas Vulcan was and remained, in native Latin cult, the god of destroying fire, and had nothing to do with its industrial uses.