Hera

Born under a willow on Samos

The people of the island of Samos claimed Hera’s story before Zeus came into it. They said she was born beside the river Imbrasos, under a willow tree. Pausanias, a Greek traveller who described the places he visited, says the willow was still growing inside her sanctuary, the sacred ground set aside for her, when he was there.

Herodotus, a Greek historian, called the temple on Samos the greatest he knew. Offerings piled up there over centuries. One of them was the Kore of Samos, a marble statue of a young woman 1.92 metres tall. A man named Cheramyes gave it to Hera around 570 to 560 BC, and it is now in the Louvre museum.

A courtship in disguise

Even the courtship of Hera and Zeus carried a warning. Near Argos stood the Argive Heraion, another great sanctuary of Hera. Pausanias saw her statue there. It was huge, made of gold and ivory by the sculptor Polycleitus. Hera held a pomegranate in one hand and a sceptre in the other, with a cuckoo on top.

Pausanias was told why the cuckoo was there. Zeus had once turned himself into the bird, so that the young Hera would catch it and keep it. Pausanias did not believe the story, but he wrote it down all the same. Their marriage became famous for his disguises, and it began with the bride holding one of them in her hands.

Queen beside Zeus

The early Greek poet Hesiod lists the wives of Zeus in his Theogony, a poem about the birth of the gods. Hera comes last, after six earlier unions. She becomes his queen. She bears him Hebe, Ares and Eileithyia, the goddess whose presence could free a woman from labour.

People prayed to Hera about marriage and childbirth. At Argos and Samos her sanctuaries claimed a power much greater than the familiar picture of a jealous wife.

Still, Hera could not make Zeus faithful. Nor could she punish him the way he punished her. So her anger turned towards the women he pursued and the children he fathered. This imbalance explains her methods, without excusing them. Zeus caused the trouble, and people with less power paid for it.

The children Hera bore in anger

The sources do not give Hera one settled family story. Hesiod says Zeus brought Athena out of his own head, and Hera then bore Hephaestus without Zeus.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an early poem in Apollo’s honour, tells of a different revenge. In the hymn, Hera threw the weak-footed Hephaestus into the sea. She stayed away from Zeus’s bed for a year and bore the destructive Typhaon without him.

So one poem gives Hera a fatherless Hephaestus, and the other gives her Typhaon. Both turn the making of children into a contest between husband and wife. In the hymn, her answer to Zeus became a plague on humankind. Here too, people outside the marriage paid for the struggle inside it.

The oath that decided Heracles’ life

Hera’s most crushing victory began with a boast. Zeus told the gathered gods that a descendant of the hero Perseus, born that day, would rule over his neighbours. Hera made him swear to it. Then she left Olympus, the home of the gods.

In Argos she brought Eurystheus into the world after only seven months. At the same time, she held back the birth of Heracles. His mother, Alcmena, was in labour with him, and his father was Zeus.

Zeus saw the trap too late. Eurystheus received the power meant for Heracles. Heracles would go on to kill monsters and enter the underworld, yet he had to obey a king whose chief achievement was being born first. Hera never broke the oath. She read its words more carefully than the god who swore it.

Hera nurses her enemy

The historian Diodorus tells a later story with a sharper twist. Alcmena feared Hera, so she left her baby out in a field. The goddess Athena found him. She persuaded Hera, who did not know who the child was, to nurse him. The baby sucked so hard that Hera threw him down. Athena carried him back to his mother.

So Hera, who wanted Heracles dead, had helped keep him alive.

Diodorus also says the boy was first called Alcaeus. Hera sent snakes into his bed, and he strangled them. After that, the Argives, the people of Argos, renamed him Heracles. The name sets Hera’s name beside kleos, the Greek word for glory. Each trial she sent him only added to the fame she wanted to destroy.

The hour Hera stole from Zeus

During the Trojan War, Zeus woke on Mount Ida and knew at once that the war had turned. The Trojans were running. Their hero Hector lay in the dust, fighting for breath, and the god Poseidon was driving the Greeks forward. Beside Zeus, Hera seemed to have been asleep.

She had planned every part of it. The goddess Aphrodite had lent her the embroidered band that holds desire in its folds. Sleep, a god who was afraid of Zeus, agreed to help only when Hera promised him one of the Graces as a wife. A golden cloud closed around the royal pair. Sleep waited in a fir tree until Zeus shut his eyes. In that time Hera changed the course of the war without lifting a weapon.

Then her husband woke. Zeus threatened to whip her. He reminded her of an earlier punishment, when he had hung her among the clouds with an anvil fastened to each foot. This is the problem at the centre of her stories. The queen of the gods could outwit the ruler of heaven, and he could answer by hanging her between earth and sky.

The statue that ran away

The strangest story from Samos concerns Hera’s wooden statue. Athenaeus, a later Greek writer, preserves an account by Menodotus, a local writer from Samos.

Enemies of Admete, the priestess, paid raiders to steal the goddess from her temple, which had no doors. The thieves got the statue to their ship, but the ship would not move. So they carried Hera back to the beach, set cakes in front of her and fled.

At dawn the searchers decided the goddess had run away. They wound willow branches around the statue to stop her leaving again. Admete freed it, purified it and put it back in the temple.

Every year, at a festival called the Tonaia, the people of Samos carried Hera down to the shore. They hid her there and set out cakes. The account does not say they tied her up again. Instead, the island remembered the day by making its queen disappear once a year.