Hera- Greek GodDeity"Queen of the Gods"

Queen of Heaven

Kronos swallowed each of his children at birth, fearing a prophecy that they would overthrow him. Hera spent her earliest years in her father's stomach. When Zeus, the one child Rhea managed to hide, grew to manhood and forced Kronos to disgorge his siblings, Hera emerged. In the Iliad, she claims to have been raised by Oceanus and Tethys at the edge of the world while the war between Zeus and the Titans raged, a story she uses as cover to slip away from Olympus.

The Sacred Marriage

Zeus pursued Hera, and she refused him. The courtship was long. Zeus transformed himself into a shivering cuckoo during a violent storm. Hera found the small bird and held it to her breast to warm it. Zeus resumed his true form and seized her. Having been compromised, she agreed to marriage. At the foot of Mount Thornax in Argolis, where the seduction happened, a temple to Hera Zygia stood in its memory. The mountain was afterward called Cuckoo Mountain.

Their wedding drew every god on Olympus. Gaia gave Hera a tree bearing golden apples, which she planted in a garden at the edge of the world, guarded by the Hesperides and the dragon Ladon. The wedding night lasted three hundred years. At Argos and Samos, annual rites reenacted the marriage, with Hera's statue bathed and reunited with Zeus.

Zeus could not be faithful. Hera could not forgive.

The White Heifer

Zeus loved Io, a priestess of Hera at Argos. When Hera discovered them, Zeus turned Io into a white heifer to hide her. Hera was not deceived. She claimed the heifer as a gift and set the hundred-eyed giant Argus to guard it day and night.

Io's father Inachus came to the pasture where she grazed and did not know her. She nuzzled his hand. With her hoof she traced two letters in the dust: IO. Inachus wept when he understood, but he could not free her.

Zeus sent Hermes. Hermes played his pipe until every one of Argus's hundred eyes closed, then cut off his head. But Hera was not finished. She sent a gadfly. Io fled across Greece, swam the strait that took her name (the Bosporus, "ford of the cow"), and ran on until she reached Egypt. There Zeus restored her to human form, and she bore their son Epaphus on the banks of the Nile.

The Madness of Heracles

When Zeus fathered Heracles by the mortal Alcmene, Hera moved against the child before he drew his first breath. She kept Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth and her own daughter, from attending the labor, so that Eurystheus was born first and claimed the kingship Zeus had promised to the next-born heir.

She sent two serpents to the infant's cradle. Heracles strangled them both. Years later, she drove him mad, and in his madness he killed his own wife and children. The twelve labors were his penance for a crime Hera had caused. Only after his death, when Zeus brought Heracles to Olympus as a god, did she relent. She gave him her daughter Hebe as bride.

Hephaestus and the Golden Throne

Athena sprang from Zeus's head fully armored, without a mother. Hera resolved to match the feat. She conceived alone and bore Hephaestus. But the child was born lame, and Hera, revolted, hurled him from Olympus. He fell for a full day and landed on the island of Lemnos, where the Sintian people raised him.

Hephaestus became the gods' smith, and he had not forgotten. He built a golden throne and sent it to Olympus as a gift. When Hera sat in it, invisible chains locked around her. No god could free her. Hephaestus refused all entreaties. Only Dionysus succeeded: he got the smith drunk on wine and led him back to Olympus on the back of a mule, where Hephaestus, laughing, released the chains.

Bound in the Sky

Once, Hera's frustration drove her to open rebellion. With Athena and Poseidon, she bound Zeus in chains while he slept, using a hundred knots no god could untie.

The sea-nymph Thetis saved him. She summoned the hundred-handed giant Briareus from Tartarus. He climbed to Olympus and with his hundred hands untied every knot at once. Zeus took terrible vengeance. He hung Hera from the sky by golden chains, with anvils tied to her ankles, suspended between heaven and earth. The other gods wept to see her but dared not help. Only when she swore never to rebel again did he release her.

The Deception of Zeus

Hera's hatred of Troy began with the Judgment of Paris. When the Trojan prince chose Aphrodite over her, she swore the city would burn.

She threw her full weight behind the Greeks. In the Iliad, she borrowed Aphrodite's kestos, an embroidered girdle woven with desire, and seduced Zeus on Mount Ida, lulling him to sleep so that Poseidon could aid the Greeks unchecked. When Troy fell and its people were killed or enslaved, Hera was satisfied at last.

The Peacock's Eyes

After Hermes killed Argus, Hera gathered the giant's hundred eyes and set them in the tail feathers of the peacock. Her sacred bird carried the gaze of her dead servant forever after.

At the great Heraion in Argos, Polykleitos carved her in gold and ivory: enthroned, a pomegranate in one hand, a scepter crowned with a cuckoo in the other. The cuckoo for the trick that began her marriage. The peacock for the servant who died in it.