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 The God Beneath the Sea The God Beneath the Sea is a children's novel based on Greek mythology, written by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen, illustrated by Charles Keeping, and published by Longman in 1970. It was awarded the annual Carnegie Medal (Garfield & Blishen) and commended for the companion Greenaway Medal (Keeping) by the British Library Association. Pantheon Books published a U.S. edition with illustrations by Zevi Blum in 1971. The novel begins with newborn Hephaestus (the titular god beneath the sea) cast from Mount Olympus by his mother Hera. He is raised in a grotto by Thetis and