Hera

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Queen of the Olympian gods and goddess of marriage, women, and childbirth, whose blessing sanctified the wedding bond and whose jealousy became a force that hunted her husband’s lovers across the world.
Role in Mythos: Hera is the wife and sister of Zeus and the ruling queen of heaven, presiding over marriage and married women while waging a lifelong campaign against the mortals and offspring her husband’s infidelities produced.
Relation to Humans: She was the protector of wives, brides, and women in childbirth, and cities such as Argos and Samos built her the earliest great temples in the Greek world. Yet the same goddess who guarded the marriage bed pursued the women Zeus seduced with a patience that outlasted their lifetimes.

Rain fell on the mountain, and a small bird beat its soaked wings against the window of a goddess who was not yet a wife. She took pity on it. She gathered the shivering cuckoo to her breast to warm it, and in her arms the bird swelled and changed into Zeus, who had wanted her, been refused, and found this way around the refusal. That is one account of how the queen of heaven was won, and it fits the marriage that followed. It began with a deception, and for the rest of her long reign she would treat every one of her husband’s deceptions as a debt to be collected in full.

She was born to the Titans Cronus and Rhea, one of six children their father swallowed whole the moment each was born, terrified of a prophecy that his own child would unseat him. Hera spent her first existence inside him, in the dark, until Zeus escaped the same fate and forced Cronus to bring his siblings back up. Disgorged fully grown, she was sent to the ends of the earth to be raised by the ocean-Titans Oceanus and Tethys while the war against the Titans burned. When it was over and Zeus ruled, he took his sister to wife. Their wedding night, some said, lasted three hundred years on the island of Samos, and the earth itself gave gifts, the golden apples that would later grow in the garden at the world’s western edge.

To look at her was to understand rank before anything else. The sculptors and vase-painters gave her the body of a grown woman in her full authority, broad-browed and grave, her hair bound under a tall crown or a stiff cylindrical cap, a veil falling from it, a scepter in her hand. Homer called her ox-eyed, and the phrase was praise: wide, dark, calm eyes in a face that did not need to raise its voice. Beside her stood the peacock, and the hundred eyes scattered across its tail were not decoration. They were a memorial to a servant she had lost.

That servant was Argus, a giant covered in a hundred eyes, and his story is the clearest window into how she operated. Zeus had taken a priestess named Io, and when he sensed his wife approaching he turned the girl into a white heifer to hide the affair. Hera was not fooled for a moment. She admired the lovely cow and asked, sweetly, if she might have it as a gift, and Zeus could not refuse without confessing. So she took the heifer and set Argus to guard it, a watchman who never fully slept because only some of his eyes closed at a time. Zeus sent Hermes, who lulled every eye shut with stories and a pipe and then cut off the giant’s head. Hera gathered up the hundred dead eyes and set them in the tail of her peacock, so they would never quite be gone, and then she sent a gadfly to torment the heifer, driving poor Io in a maddened run across half the known world.

The pattern held for centuries. When Zeus fathered Heracles, Hera delayed the birth by crossing her legs and knotting her clothing to keep the child in the womb, then sent two serpents into his cradle, which the infant strangled. She was not finished. Grown, the hero was struck with a madness she sent, and in it he killed his own children, and the labors that made him famous were the penance for that slaughter. His very name means “glory of Hera,” which is either a bitter joke or an attempt to appease her, and it worked no better than anything else did. She forbade the pregnant Leto any solid ground on which to give birth to Apollo and Artemis. She tricked Semele into asking Zeus to reveal himself in his full divinity, and the sight burned the mortal woman to ash. Callisto she turned into a bear. When three goddesses were told to let a Trojan prince judge which of them was fairest, and the prince chose Aphrodite over her, Hera threw her whole weight behind the Greeks and helped grind Troy into the ground. She held grudges the size of wars.

She was not without tenderness for those who honored her. She loved Jason, who once carried an old woman across a flooded river without knowing she was the goddess in disguise, and she steered the Argonauts through their voyage and turned her fury on the king who had slighted her. Married women prayed to her at every stage of a wedding, and she could restore her own maidenhood each year by bathing in a spring near Argos, a queen forever renewing the very state her marriage had ended.

Her power was real and wide. She was queen of the gods, able to summon storms, command lesser divinities, and reach into the moment of birth itself through her daughter Eileithyia. Her anger alone could redirect the fate of heroes and cities. And yet the shape of her power was also the shape of her cage. It was almost always reactive, triggered by Zeus and bent against the people he wronged her with rather than against the man himself. She never once managed to stop him. When she went too far, chaining and battering him in a palace coup or hounding Heracles across the sea, he hung her from the sky by her wrists with anvils lashed to her ankles until she swore to behave. She ruled heaven and could not rule her own husband, and every woman and child she destroyed was a substitute for the one target she could not touch.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hera in Greek mythology?

Hera is the queen of the Olympian gods and the goddess of marriage, women, and childbirth. She is the wife and older sister of Zeus and a daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. She is best known for her royal authority over Olympus and for her relentless jealousy toward Zeus’s many lovers and their children.

Why is Hera so jealous and vengeful?

Hera’s jealousy stems from Zeus’s constant infidelity. Because she could not punish Zeus himself, who was king of the gods, she directed her anger at the mortal women he seduced and the children they bore, such as Io, Callisto, Semele, and especially Heracles. Her wrath is one of the driving forces behind many Greek myths.

What are Hera’s symbols and sacred animals?

Hera’s most famous symbol is the peacock, whose tail she marked with the hundred eyes of her slain guardian Argus. She is also associated with the cuckoo, the cow, the diadem or crown, and the royal scepter. Her sacred sites included the great temples known as the Heraion at Argos and Samos.

Who were Hera’s children?

Hera was the mother of Ares, the god of war, Hebe, the goddess of youth, and Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth. In many versions she is also the mother of Hephaestus, the smith god, whom some accounts say she conceived alone without a father in answer to Zeus producing Athena from his own head.

Who is the Roman equivalent of Hera?

The Roman equivalent of Hera is Juno, queen of the Roman gods and protector of the state and of women. Like Hera, Juno was a goddess of marriage and was regarded as the wife of the sky-king, known to the Romans as Jupiter.