Hephaestus make love to Athena: at the moment of climax she pushes him aside, and his semen falls to the earth where it impregnates Gaia." Hephaestus was associated by Greek colonists in southern Italy with the volcano gods Adranus (of Mount Etna) and Vulcanus of the Lipari islands. The first-century sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have observed, "there are many other mountains all over the earth that are on fire, and yet we should never be done with it if we assigned to them giants and gods like Hephaestus". In the Trojan war, Hephaestus sided with the Greeks, but
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