Hera

The hour Hera stole from Zeus

Zeus wakes on Mount Ida and knows at once that the war has changed. The Trojans are running. Hector lies in the dust, struggling for breath, while Poseidon drives the Greeks forward. Beside Zeus, Hera appears to have been sleeping.

She arranged every detail. Aphrodite lent her the embroidered band that carries desire in its folds. Sleep, terrified of Zeus, agreed only after Hera promised him one of the Graces as a wife. A golden cloud closed around the royal couple; Sleep waited in a fir tree until Zeus shut his eyes. In that interval, Hera altered the course of the war without lifting a weapon.

Then her husband woke. Zeus threatened to whip her and recalled an earlier punishment, when he had hung Hera among the clouds with an anvil fastened to each foot. This is the difficulty at the centre of her stories: the queen of the gods can outmanoeuvre the ruler of heaven, but he can answer by suspending her between earth and sky.

What it meant to be the wife of Zeus

In Hesiod’s Theogony, Hera comes last after six earlier unions of Zeus. She becomes his queen and bears Hebe, Ares and Eileithyia, whose presence could release a woman from labour. Worshippers approached Hera over marriage and childbirth; at Argos and Samos, her sanctuaries proclaimed an authority larger than the familiar portrait of a jealous wife.

Even the courtship carried a warning. Pausanias saw a cuckoo on Hera’s sceptre at the Argive Heraion. He was told that Zeus had taken the bird’s shape so the young Hera would catch it and keep it. Pausanias did not believe the story, but recorded it: a marriage famous for disguises begins with the bride embracing one.

Hera cannot make Zeus faithful or punish him as he punishes her. Her anger travels instead towards the women he pursues and the children he fathers. The imbalance explains her methods without absolving them. Zeus creates the crisis; those with less power absorb the consequences.

The oath that decided the life of Heracles

Hera’s most devastating victory begins with a boast. Zeus tells the assembled gods that a descendant of Perseus born that day will rule his neighbours. Hera makes him swear to it, then leaves Olympus. In Argos, she brings Eurystheus into the world after only seven months and delays Alcmena, who is labouring with Zeus’s son Heracles.

Zeus sees the trap too late. Eurystheus receives the power intended for Heracles, and the hero who will kill monsters and enter the underworld must obey a king whose decisive achievement was being born first. Hera has not broken Zeus’s oath. She has read it more carefully than he did.

A later account by Diodorus sharpens the irony. Fearing Hera, Alcmena abandons her baby in a field. Athena finds him and persuades Hera, who does not recognise the child, to nurse him. The infant pulls so hard that she casts him down; Athena returns him to Alcmena. The goddess who wants Heracles dead has kept him alive.

Diodorus says he was first called Alcaeus. After he strangled the snakes Hera sent into his bed, the Argives named him Heracles, combining Hera’s name with kleos, glory. Every trial she sends enlarges the reputation she means to extinguish.

The children Hera bears in anger

The sources do not give Hera one settled family story. Hesiod says she bears Hephaestus without Zeus, after Zeus produces Athena from his own head. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo imagines a different retaliation. There Hera casts the weak-footed Hephaestus into the sea, stays away from Zeus’s bed for a year and bears the destructive Typhaon without him.

One poem gives Hera a fatherless Hephaestus; the other gives her Typhaon. Both turn creation into a contest between husband and wife. In the hymn, her answer to Zeus becomes a plague to humankind. As with Heracles, people outside the marriage pay for the struggle within it.

Why Samos tied its goddess to a willow

Samos claimed Hera’s story before Zeus entered it. The islanders said she was born beside the river Imbrasos beneath a willow still growing inside her sanctuary when Pausanias visited. Herodotus called the Samian temple the greatest he knew. Centuries of offerings accumulated there; among them was the 1.92-metre marble Kore of Samos, dedicated to Hera by a man named Cheramyes around 570–560 BC and now in the Louvre.

The strangest Samian tradition concerns Hera’s wooden image. Athenaeus preserves an account by the local writer Menodotus: enemies of the priestess Admete hired raiders to steal the goddess from her doorless temple. The thieves reached their ship, but it would not move. They carried Hera back to the beach, placed cakes before her and fled.

At dawn, searchers decided that the goddess had run away. They wound willow branches around the image to keep her from leaving again. Admete released it, purified it and returned it to the temple.

At the annual Tonaia, the Samians carried Hera to the shore, hid her and set out cakes. The account does not say they bound her again. Once had been enough. Samos remembered the day by making its queen disappear.