Hera

• 1. Introduction

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  Hera is the goddess of marriage, women, and family in ancient Greek religion, and the protector of women during childbirth. She is the queen of the twelve Olympians and of Mount Olympus, the sister and wife of Zeus, and the daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Her name carries weight far beyond the myths most people half-remember. It survives in Mycenaean Greek, written in the Linear B syllabary as e-ra, on clay tablets found at Pylos and Thebes. Yet scholars still cannot agree on what the name means. One reading offers Mistress, the feminine to Heros, Master. Another, proposed by A. J. van Windekens, gives young cow or heifer. How did a goddess with no settled etymology become the matron of Olympus and the most jealous figure in Greek story? Why do her oldest temples hold votive gifts from Armenia, Babylon, Iran, Assyria, and Egypt? And why did she renew her virginity every year in a spring near Nauplia, in rites no one was allowed to describe?

• 2. Cow-Eyed Mistress

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  Boôpis, the Homeric epithet, is always translated cow-eyed. Homer in the Iliad uses the formula boōpis potnia Hērē, cow-eyed mistress Hera, a phrase that may relate her to a Mediterranean goddess of nature. Her sacred animals include the cow, the cuckoo, and the peacock, and she is sometimes shown holding a pomegranate as an emblem of immortality. Her familiar association ran first to cattle, a Cow Goddess venerated especially in cattle-rich Euboea, which was considered her holy place. On Cyprus, very early sites contain bull skulls adapted for use as masks. The cow connection survived into historical times, and probably ties Hera to Near-Eastern cow-goddesses such as Hathor, the Egyptian maternal deity associated with cattle. The link runs deeper still through Io, a priestess of Hera at the Heraion of Argos who was transformed into a heifer. Hera absorbed the cult of this heifer-priestess. Walter Burkert records memories of an even older worship: an aniconic Hera, represented as a pillar at Argos and as a plank at Samos, tied to a willow tree to ensure fertility.

• 3. The Vengeful Wife

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  She is intensely jealous and vindictive toward Zeus's children and their mothers, and he is threatening and violent toward her. That is the marriage at the heart of her mythology. When Hera learned that Semele, daughter of Cadmus, was pregnant by Zeus, she disguised herself as Semele's nurse. She persuaded the princess to demand that Zeus appear in his true form, and his thunder and lightning destroyed her. Lamia, a queen of Libya whom Zeus loved, lost her children to Hera's jealousy and was disfigured into a child-killing monster. Gerana, a queen of the Pygmies, boasted she was more beautiful than Hera and was turned into a crane condemned to wage eternal war on the Pygmy folk. Toward Leto she sent Ares and Iris to keep the pregnant goddess from giving birth, and in one version kidnapped Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, until the other gods bribed her with a necklace no one could resist. Even Tiresias suffered. Asked whether men or women felt more pleasure in love, he sided with Zeus, and Hera struck him blind.

• 4. Glory Of Hera

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  The name Heracles means Glory of Hera, an irony built into his life, because Hera was his stepmother and his enemy. When Alcmene was about to give birth to him, Hera descended from Olympus to Argos and made the wife of Sthenelus deliver Eurystheus after only seven months, while delaying Alcmene's labor, so that Eurystheus, not Heracles, would rule. While Heracles was still an infant, she sent two serpents to kill him in his cot, and he throttled them with his bare hands. She drove him mad as an adult, leading him to murder his family, and then set him to labor for Eurystheus at Mycenae. She made nearly all twelve labours harder. She sent a crab to bite his feet during the fight with the Lernaean Hydra. When he took the cattle of Geryon, he shot her in the right breast with a triple-barbed arrow, a wound that was incurable and left her in constant pain, as Dione tells Aphrodite in Book V of the Iliad. Yet the enmity did not last forever. Heracles saved Hera from the giant Porphyrion during the Gigantomachy, and she gave him her daughter Hebe as his bride.

• 5. War Over Troy

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  A golden apple inscribed with kallistēi, To the fairest, set the Trojan War in motion. Eris, the goddess of discord, was the only one not invited to the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the eventual parents of Achilles. She threw the apple through the door, and Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena each claimed it. Zeus refused to judge and handed the choice to Paris, a Trojan prince. Hera offered him political power and control of all of Asia. Athena offered wisdom and glory in battle. Aphrodite offered the most beautiful mortal woman in the world, and Paris chose her. That woman was Helen, already married to King Menelaus of Sparta. Hera and Athena, enraged, sided with the Greeks once the war began. In Book 5 of the Iliad, Hera helped drive Ares from the battlefield, encouraging Diomedes as Athena guided his spear into the war god's body. In Book 14, she devised the Deception of Zeus, seducing him with Aphrodite's help and lulling him into deep sleep through Hypnos, so the gods could intervene without fear. The three cities I love best, she declares in the Iliad, are Argos, Sparta and Mycenae of the broad streets.

• 6. Queen Of Temples

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  About 800 BCE, Hera may have been the first deity to whom the Greeks dedicated an enclosed roofed temple sanctuary, at Samos. It was later replaced by the Heraion of Samos, one of the largest of all Greek temples. The temple built by the sculptors and architects of the Rhoecus workshop was destroyed between 570 and 560 BCE, then replaced by the Polycratean temple of 540 to 530 BCE, where a forest of 155 columns once stood. Herodotus calls Rhoecus of Samos its first architect. The main center of her cult was the North-Eastern Peloponnese, especially Argolis. The Argive Hera, Hera Argeia, was worshipped at a sanctuary between the former Mycenaean cities of Argos and Mycenae, where festivals called Heraia were held. The oldest temple at Olympia belonged to her, and her seated cult figure there was older than the warrior figure of Zeus beside it. In Magna Graecia, two Doric temples to Hera were built at Paestum, around 550 BCE and around 450 BCE. One of them, long called the Temple of Poseidon, was identified in the 1950s as a temple of Hera. The votive offerings at Samos, many from the late 8th and 7th centuries BCE, included figures from Armenia, Babylon, Iran, Assyria, and Egypt.

• 7. Maiden Mother Crone

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  At Stymphalia in Arcadia there was a triple shrine to Hera the Girl, Pais, the Adult Woman, Teleia, and the Separated, Chērē, meaning Widowed or Divorced. The three festivals there celebrated those phases, with Pais marking her arrival in spring and Chera her departure in winter. The cycle ran through her cult everywhere. At the spring of Kanathos near Nauplia, Hera renewed her virginity annually in rites that were not to be spoken of, the arrheton. Robert Graves read this as the new moon, full moon, and old moon, personifying the Virgin of Spring, the Mother of Summer, and the destroying Crone of Autumn. The fire-festival Daedala at Plataea staged the goddess's quarrel with Zeus and their reconciliation. After Hera retreated to Euboea, the local king Cithaeron advised Zeus to wrap a wooden statue and pretend to marry it, claiming she was Plataea, Asopus's daughter. When Hera tore the dress away and found a lifeless statue, the couple reconciled. To commemorate this, a wooden statue of Hera was bathed in the river Asopus, raised on a chariot like a bride, and then ritually burned. At Samos, in the festival Toneia, the image was carried to the sea, bound in willows, and hidden, while the participants tried to find it.

• 8. Before The Hellenes

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  Johann Jakob Bachofen, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, raised the possibility that Hera was originally the goddess of a matriarchal people who inhabited Greece before the Hellenes. In that reading, her role as goddess of marriage marked her own subordination, and her famous jealousy was her resistance to the conquests of Zeus. Modern scholars generally reject the claim of an ancient matriarchy as insufficiently evidenced. Walter Burkert notes that the Kourotrophos figure is almost absent in Crete, and that Mother Goddess was not the underlying principle of Minoan religion. What is firmer is her layered origin. She emerged from a form of the Mycenaean goddess of the palace and became the spouse of Zeus. A Linear B tablet from Pylos records offerings to Zeus-Hera-Drimios, Drimios being the son of Zeus. The hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of Zeus with the earth goddess finally named Hera, was celebrated at Knossos in Crete by the river Theren, a ritual that continued unchanged from very ancient times. Compared to that mighty goddess, Burkert calls the termagant of Homer an almost comic figure. Her Roman counterpart is Juno, and through her the peacock motif passed into Renaissance iconography that unified the two queens.