Vulcan and the Forging of the Gods' Weapons
At a Glance
- Central figures: Vulcan, god of fire and the forge, lame smith of the gods; Venus, his wife; Jupiter, king of the gods; Mars, god of war; Minerva, goddess of strategic warfare; Achilles, mortal son of the sea-nymph Thetis.
- Setting: Vulcan’s workshop beneath the volcanic island of Lipara in the Aeolian archipelago, and the broader divine order of Rome’s gods; drawn principally from Virgil’s Aeneid (Book VIII) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
- The turn: Venus comes to Vulcan’s forge and asks him to make divine armor for her mortal son Aeneas, who faces war in Latium - and Vulcan, despite knowing she has betrayed him with Mars, cannot refuse her.
- The outcome: Vulcan and his Cyclopes forge the shield of Aeneas, on which the future history of Rome is hammered into bronze and gold, along with weapons for the gods themselves - the thunderbolts of Jupiter, the aegis of Minerva, the chariot fittings of Mars.
- The legacy: The Volcanalia, celebrated on August 23rd, when Romans threw live fish and small animals into bonfires as offerings to Vulcan, asking him to hold his destructive fire in check for another year.
The fire never went out beneath Lipara. Fishermen working the strait between Sicily and the smaller islands could see the glow at night - a dull orange in the rock face, pulsing like something breathing. They did not land there. The smoke smelled of sulfur and hot iron, and sometimes the sea around the island boiled in patches, killing the fish belly-up. The Romans knew what lived underneath. Vulcan had his forge there, deep in the mountain’s gut, and his Cyclopes worked the bellows day and night.
He had been thrown from heaven as an infant. Jupiter - or Juno, depending on which telling you trusted - had looked at the baby’s twisted foot and dropped him. He fell for a full day. The sea caught him. Thetis and her sister nymphs raised him in an underwater grotto, and there, with nothing but time and a child’s furious patience, he learned to work metal. By the time the gods called him back to take his place among them, he could do things with bronze and gold that no other hand, mortal or divine, could match.
The Lame Husband
They gave him Venus for a wife. This was Jupiter’s decision, and it had the quality of all Jupiter’s arrangements - orderly on the surface, cruel underneath. Venus was the most desired of the goddesses. Vulcan was the least desired of the gods. He walked with a heavy limp, his hands were scarred and calloused, and he smelled of the forge at all hours. He knew what the arrangement was. He accepted it the way a Roman magistrate accepts a difficult posting: without complaint, because pietas demanded it.
Venus did not hide her affair with Mars. The whole of heaven knew. Vulcan caught them once - rigged an invisible net of bronze wire so fine it could not be seen, strung it above the bed, and dropped it on the two of them while they lay together. He called the other gods to witness. They came. Some laughed. Mercury said he would gladly trade places with Mars, net and all. Vulcan stood apart from the laughter, holding the rope that controlled the net, and said nothing. He released them. Mars went back to Thrace. Venus went wherever Venus went.
And Vulcan went back to the forge.
The Workshop under Lipara
The space itself was enormous - a natural cavern widened by centuries of work, its ceiling black with soot, its floor cut with channels that directed streams of molten rock from the volcano’s core into heating trenches. Three Cyclopes worked under Vulcan’s direction: Brontes, whose name meant Thunder; Steropes, whose name meant Lightning; and Pyracmon, whose name meant Fire-Anvil. Each stood taller than two men and had a single eye centered in the forehead, unblinking in the heat.
When Virgil described the scene in the eighth book of the Aeneid, the Cyclopes were working on three projects at once. A thunderbolt for Jupiter lay half-finished on the central anvil - three shafts of twisted rain, three of compressed cloud, three of red fire, three of screaming wind, all being hammered together into a single weapon. On a second bench, they were polishing the aegis for Minerva - the terrible breastplate with the Gorgon’s head set into its center, the snakes still writhing in the metalwork. On a third, they fitted the gold plates of Mars’s chariot, the vehicle that drove men to frenzy on the battlefield.
Vulcan directed all of it. He moved between the anvils with his uneven gait, checking the color of heated metal by eye, testing the weight of a blade by resting it across one finger. His hands were the surest thing about him. Everything else - the limp, the marriage, the humiliation - fell away when he worked.
Venus at the Forge
She came to him at night. This is in Virgil, and Virgil is precise about the scene: Venus waited until Vulcan was in bed, in their shared chamber, and she lay beside him and spoke softly. Her son Aeneas had reached the coast of Latium. The Rutulians under Turnus were preparing for war. Aeneas needed armor - real armor, divine armor, the kind only Vulcan could make.
She touched him. Virgil says that the old familiar heat ran through Vulcan’s body - notus per ossa calor - and he could not refuse. He did not pretend he could. He told her she need only have asked sooner.
He rose before dawn and crossed to the forge.
The Shield of Aeneas
What Vulcan made for Aeneas was not merely armor. The shield he hammered out over the following days carried on its surface the entire future history of Rome - events that had not yet happened, that Aeneas himself would never live to see. Vulcan knew these things because gods see forward as easily as back.
He hammered the she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus into the center boss. Around it he set the rape of the Sabine women, the war with the Sabines, the punishment of Mettius Fufetius torn apart by chariots. He worked the Gallic siege of the Capitol - the sacred geese crying the alarm, Manlius rising from sleep to throw the first Gaul back down the cliff. He set the Battle of Actium into the widest band of the shield: Augustus on the prow, the Julian star burning above his head, Agrippa beside him, and across the water Antonius with his foreign queen and her jackal-headed gods. The Nile opened its bronze arms to receive the defeated.
Aeneas, when Thetis’s divine counterpart brought the shield to him on the banks of the Tiber, lifted it and turned it in the light. He did not understand the images. He could not read Roman history because Roman history had not happened yet. Virgil says he marveled at the pictures and shouldered the fame and fate of his descendants - rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet.
He carried a future he could not decipher into a war he might not survive.
The Volcanalia
Every August 23rd, the Romans honored the god who worked beneath the earth. The festival was old - older than the Republic, older than the kings, reaching back into the time when Rome was a cluster of huts on the Palatine and fire was the most dangerous thing in the world. On the Volcanalia, the heads of households lit bonfires in the open and threw live fish into the flames. The fish were substitutes - life for life, offered so that Vulcan’s fire would consume the offering and leave the household, the granary, the city standing.
They did not celebrate Vulcan’s craft on the Volcanalia. They asked him to hold back. The same hands that made Jupiter’s thunderbolts and Aeneas’s shield could also, if the god chose, send fire through the streets of a city built mostly of wood. Romans understood this about their gods: the same numen that protected could also destroy. There was no contradiction. There was only the offering, the formula spoken correctly, the fish twisting in the flames.