Hera

The hour Hera stole from Zeus

Zeus woke on Mount Ida and knew at once that the war had changed. The Trojans were running, Hector lay in the dust struggling for breath, and Poseidon was driving the Greeks forward. Beside him, Hera appeared to have been sleeping.

She had arranged every part of it. Aphrodite had lent her the embroidered band that carries desire in its folds, and Sleep, who was frightened of Zeus, agreed only after Hera promised him one of the Graces as a wife. A golden cloud closed around the royal couple while 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 reminded her of an earlier punishment, when he had hung her among the clouds with an anvil fastened to each foot. That is the difficulty at the centre of her stories: the queen of the gods could outmanoeuvre the ruler of heaven, and he could answer by suspending her between earth and sky.

The terms of the marriage

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, and at Argos and Samos her sanctuaries proclaimed an authority much 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, and he was told that Zeus had taken the bird’s shape so that the young Hera would catch it and keep it. Pausanias did not believe the story, but he recorded it all the same: a marriage famous for disguises began with the bride taking one into her hands.

Hera could not make Zeus faithful and could not punish him as he punished her, so her anger travelled instead towards the women he pursued and the children he fathered. The imbalance explains her methods without absolving them. Zeus created the crisis, and those with less power absorbed the consequences of it.

The oath that decided the life of Heracles

Hera’s most devastating victory began with a boast. Zeus told the assembled gods that a descendant of Perseus born that day would rule his neighbours. Hera made him swear to it and then left Olympus. In Argos she brought Eurystheus into the world after only seven months, and she held back Alcmena, who was labouring with Zeus’s son Heracles.

Zeus saw the trap too late. Eurystheus received the power intended for Heracles, and the hero who would kill monsters and enter the underworld had to obey a king whose decisive achievement was being born first. Hera had not broken the oath; she had read it more carefully than the god who swore it.

A later account by Diodorus sharpens the irony. Fearing Hera, Alcmena abandoned her baby in a field, and Athena found him and persuaded Hera, who did not recognise the child, to nurse him. The infant pulled so hard that she cast him down, and Athena carried him back to Alcmena. The goddess who wanted Heracles dead had kept him alive.

Diodorus says the boy was first called Alcaeus, and that after he strangled the snakes Hera sent into his bed the Argives renamed him Heracles, setting her name beside kleos, glory. Every trial she sent enlarged the reputation she meant to extinguish.

The children Hera bore in anger

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

One poem gives Hera a fatherless Hephaestus and the other gives her Typhaon, and both turn creation into a contest between husband and wife. In the hymn her answer to Zeus became a plague to humankind. As with Heracles, the people outside the marriage paid for the struggle inside 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 that was still growing inside her sanctuary when Pausanias visited. Herodotus called the Samian temple the greatest he knew. Centuries of offerings accumulated there, and 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 her 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, so they carried Hera back to the beach, placed cakes before her and fled.

At dawn the searchers decided that the goddess had run away, and 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 down to the shore, hid her and set out cakes. The account does not say that they bound her again. Once had been enough, and Samos remembered the day by making its queen disappear.