Hera

Greek mythology – Present

Queen of the gods and goddess of marriage and family; the wife and sister of Zeus, famous for her pride and her jealous fury.

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Hera was the queen of the Greek gods and the goddess of marriage, women, and family. She was both the wife and the sister of Zeus, and she ruled beside him on Mount Olympus as the most powerful of the goddesses. As the protector of marriage, she was worshipped by women across the Greek world, and her symbols, the peacock, the crown, and the cow, marked her as a figure of royalty and dignity. But Hera is best remembered in myth for her jealousy. Because Zeus was constantly unfaithful, Hera's stories are full of her anger toward his lovers and their children. Her most famous grudge was against Heracles, Zeus's son by a mortal woman; Hera tormented him throughout his life, and even his name (meaning 'glory of Hera') was a kind of bitter joke. Hera matters not because she is simply 'the jealous wife,' but because her stories dramatize real tensions the Greeks cared about, loyalty, betrayal, family honor, and the danger of a powerful person scorned. She is a reminder that the Greek gods were not moral ideals to imitate; they were larger-than-life mirrors of human emotions, reflecting people's own pride, love, and rage back at them at enormous scale. How we know. Hera’s sanctuary at Argos and her role in Homer and later tragedy are the evidence. Her persecution of Heracles drives the Twelve Labors.

Hera

Further reading

Hera

Further reading