Volcanology that Hephaestus, the god of fire, sat below the volcano Etna, forging the weapons of Zeus. The Greek word used to describe volcanoes was "etna", or "hiera", after Heracles, the son of Zeus. The Roman poet Virgil, in interpreting the Greek mythos, held that the giant Enceladus was buried beneath Etna by the goddess Athena as punishment for rebellion against the gods; the mountain's rumblings were his tormented cries, the flames his breath and the tremors his railing against the bars of his prison. Enceladus' brother Mimas was buried beneath Vesuvius by Hephaestus, and the blood of other defeated giants
The God Beneath the Sea novel's narrative structure was singled out by reviewers with similarly divided verdicts. For Manning, the novel's opening, "an excellent device ...to allow the book to start dramatically", and subsequent moments of pace and tension, are ruined by chronic over-writing. Nye felt the use of the two falls of Hephaestus as a framing device "makes sense of what comes in-between", but for Nye "it is a savage sort of sense, depending to a large extent on melodrama". "History Today" claimed the choice to retell the myths as a continuous narrative resulted in "a brilliant poetic fantasy"; Hughes said of the novel's