Odyssey 8.310 · Book 8, lines 310–312
Fair Ares, and I born crippled
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Hephaestus — οὕνεχʼ ὁ μὲν καλός τε καὶ ἀρτίπος, αὐτὰρ ἐγώ γε ἠπεδανὸς γενόμην. ἀτὰρ οὔ τί μοι αἴτιος ἄλλος, ἀλλὰ τοκῆε δύω, τὼ μὴ γείνασθαι ὄφελλον.
For he is handsome and sound of foot, but I was born feeble. Yet no other is to blame for me at all, but my two parents, whom I wish had never begotten me.
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The setting
Hephaestus continues his complaint to the assembled gods, contrasting himself — lame from birth — with his rival, the handsome war-god Ares.
A note on this passage
The contrast is bald: Ares is handsome and sound of foot; Hephaestus was born feeble. And he lays the fault not on himself but on his parents, wishing they had never given him birth.
This is the one raw note in a comic song. The lame god's grievance is older than the marriage — it reaches back to the body he was born with and the mother, Hera, who in other tellings flung him from Olympus for it. For a moment the machinery of the joke shows its underside: a slight that is really about being unlovable, dressed up as a lawsuit over adultery.
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