Half-Olympian son of Hephaestus by Anticleia of Epidaurus (the Apollodoran-tradition Anticleia, distinct from the Anticleia of Ithaca who was Odysseus's mother). Born lame in both feet — the canonical paternal-Hephaestean-inheritance trait — Periphetes took up the bronze club (κορυνὴ χαλκῆ) as both walking-staff and weapon, earning his epithet Korynetes / Club-Bearer. Stationed on the Isthmus road near Epidaurus, attacked travelers with his bronze club. The Isthmian highway-bandit-tableau pairs him with the other Isthmian malefactors Theseus would slay: Sinis the pine-bender, the Crommyonian sow, Sciron the kicker, Cercyon the wrestler, Procrustes the bed-fitter — the six-labors set Theseus accomplished on the journey from Troezen to Athens (the journey by which the young Theseus, having recovered the sword and sandals his father Aegeus left under the rock at Troezen, traveled to claim his Athenian inheritance). Theseus killed Periphetes with the bronze club and carried it thereafter as his signature weapon — the canonical attribute-passage from defeated demigod-bandit to next-generation hero, paralleling the lion-skin-and-club passage from the Nemean lion to Heracles. The structural device of the hero acquiring his signature attribute through the killing of his first opponent is one of the most-replicated narrative-archetypes in Greek mythology.