Hera

Hera is the daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, and the sister of Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter and Hestia. According to Hesiod's Theogony, Cronus devoured each of his children at birth, fearing a prophecy that one of them would dethrone him; thus he also swallowed Hera. Only Zeus escaped, for Rhea hid him in Crete and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Once grown, Zeus forced Cronus to disgorge the swallowed children, and Hera was thus reborn. The Homeric tradition (Iliad XIV) tells that she was raised by the Titans Oceanus and Tethys at the ends of the earth, while the war between the gods and the Titans was being waged.

After the victory of the Olympians over the Titans, Hera married her brother Zeus and became queen of Olympus and sovereign of the gods. Her wedding, the sacred marriage par excellence, was celebrated according to tradition in the garden of the Hesperides, where Gaia caused the golden apple trees to spring up. From their union were born Ares, Hebe, Eileithyia and, in some versions, Hephaestus. Hera's reign was marked by Zeus's continual infidelities, which aroused her legendary jealousy and her relentless persecution of the god's lovers and their offspring, such as Heracles, Io or Leto. As goddess of marriage and protectress of married women, Hera blesses lawful unions and punishes conjugal betrayal.

Hera is depicted as a majestic matron, crowned with the royal diadem (the polos) and bearing the sceptre tipped with a lotus flower. Her attributes are the pomegranate, symbol of conjugal fertility, and the bridal veil. Her sacred bird is the peacock, whose tail displays the hundred eyes of the giant Argus Panoptes, whom Hera set as a watchman and, after his death, immortalised in the bird's plumage. Sacred to her also are the cow (whence her Homeric epithet 'ox-eyed', boôpis) and the cuckoo, in whose form Zeus courted her. Her chief centres of worship were the Heraion of Argos and that of Samos, where she was venerated as protectress of the city and of marriage.