Hephaestus

Hephaestus was the one Olympian whose usefulness never depended on being beautiful or beloved. Cast out at birth for a deformity, raised by sea-nymphs on the sea floor, he built his workshop out of exile and made himself indispensable from it: Zeus’s sceptre and aegis, Hermes’s winged sandals, Pandora herself, the bronze automata that served as his assistants, and — in the Iliad’s most famous set-piece — the shield of Achilles, forged for Thetis as thanks for saving him. He made Aphrodite’s girdle, the belt that made her irresistible, and married her himself; when she took Ares to bed, Hephaestus caught the pair in an unbreakable net of his own forging and hauled them in front of the other gods to be laughed at. He was worshipped chiefly at Athens and on the volcanic island of Lemnos, where his own fall was said to have landed, honored with the annual Chalkeia festival and the five-yearly Hephaestia with its torch races.

His main sanctuary, the temple above the Athenian Agora begun in 449 BCE, outlasted every other major Greek temple standing today, and not because anyone kept protecting it. Theodosius I’s edicts of 391-393 CE banned the sacrifices, shut down the festivals, and ended his public cult along with the rest of the pantheon’s. But around 700 CE someone converted his temple into a church dedicated to Saint George, and the building stayed in use — a roof over it, walls maintained, doors that opened every Sunday — for eleven more centuries, until 1834. Every other Olympian’s grandest house was burned, quarried for other buildings, or left to fall in on itself. The lame god’s forge survived by accident, kept upright by people who had forgotten who built it.