Hera

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On the plain between Argos and Mycenae, where the oldest of her great houses stood from about 800 BCE, Hera was the city’s keeper long before the poets made her a wife. She is the Greek goddess of marriage and the queen of the Olympian gods — sister and wife of Zeus, and one of the twelve great deities worshipped across the Greek world. The Romans identified her with Juno, whose own cult ran along parallel but not identical lines. Her name has resisted secure translation; ancient and modern attempts to read it as “lady,” “season,” or “the chosen one” remain guesses, and the etymology is still unsettled. The name itself is among the oldest attested in Greek: it appears on the Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Pylos and Thebes, written e-ra, some five centuries before Homer set down her quarrels in verse — so that whatever she became under the Olympian dispensation, she was already a power with a name when Greek was first committed to writing.

The queen and the wife

In the poems of Homer and Hesiod she is the most formidable of the goddesses and the least placable. She presides over marriage and the married woman, and the literature dwells above all on her jealousy: the long catalog of her revenge against Zeus’s mortal lovers and their children, Heracles among them, whose very name binds him to her even as she persecutes him. That portrait is partly an artifact of epic, which needed her as Zeus’s antagonist. In the Iliad she is the goddess who hates Troy past all reason and would see the city she loves destroyed before she would let Zeus shield it; she deceives her husband on the slopes of Mount Ida, borrowing the girdle of Aphrodite to put him to sleep and turn the war while he lies disarmed. The scene is comic and dangerous at once, and it is exact about the marriage it describes: a sovereignty shared between two who are each other’s match, in which the wife’s only leverage over the king is the bed and the word, and she uses both.

The cult tells a steadier story than the epic. Hera was not, in the sanctuaries, the shrew of the hexameters but the guarantor of the order on which a household and a city rest. Her worship was organized, more sharply than that of any other Greek deity, around the stations of a woman’s life. She was honored as Pais or Parthenos, the maiden; as Nympheuomene, the bride being led to her husband; as Teleia, the fulfilled wife — for teleia carries the sense of the completed, the woman who has come into her full estate by marrying; and even, at Stymphalus in Arcadia, as Chera, the widow or the woman set apart, where a triple shrine kept all three phases in view at once. At Nauplia she bathed each year in the spring of Kanathos and rose from it a maiden again, a renewal that the Argives counted among the secret things of her rite. To follow Hera through her epithets is to read the whole arc of a married life as a sequence of divine offices, presided over by the same goddess at every turn.

The great sanctuaries

Her cult sites are among the earliest and grandest in Greece, and the archaeology gives her a primacy the myths half conceal. The Argive Heraion, on its terraces below Mount Euboea in the Argolid, drew worshippers from the eighth century BCE; the thousands of bronze dress-pins left there mark it as a place where women came to her with the business of their own lives. The old temple burned in 423 BCE — the historian Thucydides records that the priestess Chryseis set a torch too near the garlands and fell asleep, and the fire took the whole sanctuary — and a new temple rose on a lower terrace within the decade, built under the architect Eupolemos of Argos. In its cella stood the seated gold-and-ivory image of the goddess by Polyclitus, which the traveler Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, ranked among the masterworks of Greek sculpture, the queen enthroned with the sceptre in one hand and the pomegranate in the other.

On Samos her sanctuary was older still and on a scale that announced the ambitions of a maritime power. The Samians built what may have been the first roofed temple in the Greek world; in the sixth century the architects Rhoecus and Theodorus — the first builders in Greek history whose names survive — raised a vast columned temple for her, and when it failed the tyrant Polycrates began an even larger one, a dipteral structure better than a hundred meters long ringed by some 155 columns. The votive offerings recovered there came from Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and farther east, the deposits of a shrine whose fame outran the Aegean. At Samos her festival, the Tonaia, hid her image in a thicket of willows by the shore for the worshippers to seek and find — a rite that staged, in the language of loss and recovery, the cyclical disappearance and return of the goddess herself.

At Olympia the oldest temple in the sanctuary was hers, not Zeus’s: the Heraion there, raised near the end of the seventh century BCE, stood for generations before the great temple of her husband was built beside it. Her festival, the Heraia, sent maidens running footraces in the stadium, their right shoulders bared, the winners crowned with olive and given a share of the cow cut for the goddess — the women’s counterpart, and very likely the elder, of the men’s games that made the place famous.

The sacred marriage

At the center of her cult lay the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera, enacted at sanctuaries from Crete to Boeotia and woven into the calendar of more than one Greek city — at Athens it gave its name to the winter month Gamelion, the marrying month. The rite was not a celebration of the quarrelsome union of the poems but its renewal: the wedding of sky and earth, of the king and the queen, performed so that the marriages of mortals, and the fertility of the land, might hold. At Boeotian Plataea the festival of the Daedala told the marriage as a story of estrangement and reconciliation. Hera, in the myth Pausanias preserved, withdrew from Zeus in anger; he let it be known that he was taking a new bride, dressed a wooden figure as the woman and set her on a wagon, and when Hera tore the veil from her rival and found only carved oak, her fury broke into laughter and she returned to him. Every few years the Plataeans dressed such an effigy, carried it in procession, and burned it on the summit of Mount Cithaeron — a marriage rite built around a wooden bride, in which the goddess’s withdrawal and homecoming were the very thing performed.

The persecutions that fill her myths belong to the same logic, read from the other side. Hera is the lawful wife, and her wrath falls precisely on the breaches of that law: on the women Zeus takes and the children they bear him. The nymph Io, herself once a priestess of Hera at Argos, she turned into a heifer and set a gadfly to drive across the world. Against Leto, pregnant by Zeus, she forbade the earth to give her any place to bear her twins, until the floating island of Delos received her and Apollo and Artemis were born; she even detained Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, to draw out the labor. When Semele carried Dionysus, Hera came to her disguised as an old nurse and coaxed her into demanding that Zeus appear in his full divinity, knowing the sight would destroy a mortal; the child was rescued from the ash and carried to term in his father’s thigh. And Heracles she pursued from the cradle, delaying his birth so that the lesser Eurystheus should be born first and become his master, sending serpents to his crib, driving him at last to the madness in which he killed his own children — the labors that made him a hero being also the penances she imposed. The cuckoo, the cow, the pomegranate, and the peacock are her creatures and her signs; Homer’s standing epithet for her, boopis, “cow-eyed,” keeps an older animal closeness audible in the queenly figure.

The goddess beneath the wife

Scholarship has long suspected that she is older than the Olympian arrangement that subordinates her to Zeus. Her cult sites are among the earliest and grandest in Greece, and several of her epithets and festivals point to a great goddess of fertility, sovereignty, and the seasons of a woman’s life — maiden, bride, and widow — onto whom the marriage to the sky-god was later imposed. On this reading the jealous wife of myth is the residue of an independent power brought, incompletely, under a patriarchal pantheon. The argument is circumstantial and contested, drawn more from the shape of the cult than from any text that states it. Martin Nilsson read her as in origin an Argive goddess, the protectress of the citadel, whose marriage to Zeus consolidated a local power into a Panhellenic one; the editor Jan Bremmer notes that her place as Zeus’s wife most likely grew out of that prominence at Argos rather than the other way around. What the sanctuaries make certain, whatever the prehistory, is that Hera was never merely Zeus’s appendage in the eyes of those who kept her rites: at Argos, at Samos, at Olympia, the elder and the larger house was hers.

For those who kept her rites, Hera was not a symbol of marriage but its living guarantor — invoked at weddings, watched in childbirth, feared when crossed. The Romans folded much of this into Juno, who guarded women and the Roman state alike and lent her name, through the festival month, to June; the link runs on through Jupiter’s consort and the Capitoline Triad into the imperial cult, where the goddess of the lawful wife became the model for the empress. In the philosophical and allegorical readings of late antiquity she was sometimes taken as air, or as the receptive principle wedded to the active heaven — Plutarch reports that some read her very name as a near-anagram of aer, the air — a habit of interpretation that let the old gods survive as figures for cosmic forces after their altars cooled. But the figure the Argive and Samian rites kept in view was never the allegory and never quite the shrew of the hexameters. It was the queen who could withdraw from her husband in anger and be coaxed home, whose jealousy was the underside of her office as keeper of the lawful bed: in the hieros gamos the city renewed that marriage year by year so that its own marriages might hold, dressing the wooden bride at Plataea and bathing the goddess at Kanathos until she rose a maiden to be wed again.

Texts and scholarship

The goddess is reconstructed from texts none of which set out to describe her system. The seventh-century Theogony of Hesiod fixes her descent — daughter of Kronos and Rhea, last and lawful wife of her brother Zeus, mother of Ares, Hebe, Eileithyia, and the lame smith Hephaestus — while the Iliad gives the fullest portrait of her temper and her sovereignty; both are read in English in the public-domain Loeb of Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (London: Heinemann, 1914), available through Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org/ebooks/348). The cultic evidence — the festivals, the epithets, the topography of her shrines — comes above all from the second-century-CE traveler Pausanias, whose Description of Greece describes the Argive Heraion and the cult statue of Polyclitus, in the public-domain rendering of W. H. S. Jones for the Loeb Classical Library (1918–1935), readable at the Perseus Digital Library (perseus.tufts.edu). The fire that destroyed the old temple of the Argive Hera in 423 BCE is recorded by Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 4.133, likewise available through Perseus (perseus.tufts.edu).

Ancient speculation about her name is itself part of the record. In the Cratylus, Plato has Socrates derive Hera both from eratē, “the lovely one” whom Zeus loved and married, and — “thinking of the heavens” — from a disguised form of aēr, the air, which one hears, he says, by repeating the letters of the name; the dialogue can be read in Benjamin Jowett’s translation (Cratylus). That double etymology, the bride and the air, is the seed of the entire late-antique allegorical tradition that Plutarch later passes on.

The modern scholarship on Hera turns less on the myths than on the cult and its prehistory. Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985; trans. John Raffan from the German of 1977) remains the standard synthesis, setting her among the Olympians while registering the archaeological signs of an older and independent power; a working overview is published by Harvard University Press (hup.harvard.edu). The case for reading her cult as a structured passage through the phases of a woman’s life is developed by Claude Calame in his work on choruses and female initiation in archaic Greece. The article by Jan N. Bremmer in the Encyclopedia of Religion (encyclopedia.com) gives a compact, citation-dense account of the Argive and Samian sanctuaries and of the argument that Hera’s marriage to Zeus is the consolidation of a local Argive sovereignty into a Panhellenic one. The architectural history of her two greatest houses — Rhoecus and Theodorus on Samos, the Polycratean colossus, the Argive rebuilding under Eupolemos — is summarized in the standard reference literature on Greek sanctuaries (Wikipedia, “Heraion”).

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