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Hera

Greek Deities

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Hera is the Greek queen of the gods, goddess of marriage, women and the sky, sister and wife of Zeus and daughter of Cronus and Rhea. Enthroned on Olympus, she presides over wedlock and the lives of married women, and her jealous wrath at the many infidelities of Zeus drives much of Greek myth, pursuing his lovers and their children, above all Heracles, whose name means the glory of Hera. Her chief sanctuaries were the Heraion of Argos and of Samos, and her sacred animals are the peacock and the cow, called cow-eyed in Homer. Her Roman counterpart is Juno.

Facts
Cult
Principal Cult Centre
The Heraion of Samos and the Heraion of Argos 1
Attributes and Iconography
A matronly figure crowned with the polos or a diadem, holding a sceptre 1
Attributes and Iconography
The peacock, the cuckoo and the pomegranate are hers 1
Worship and Practice
The Heraion of Samos and the Heraion of Argos ranked among the largest and most important temple complexes in the archaic Greek world, and the quadrennial Heraia festival held in her honor at Argos, later paralleled by a women's athletic festival at Olympia, made Hera one of the very few Greek deities honored with a dedicated competitive athletic festival specifically for women. 2
Practice
Lineage
Hesiod's Theogony names her children by Zeus as Ares, Hebe and Eileithyia, and credits her with bearing Hephaestus alone, without a father, in retaliation for Zeus's own solo birth of Athena. 3
Function
Domain / Function
Childbirth 1
Domain / Function
Marriage and the household 1
Domain / Function
Kingship and sovereignty 1
Identity
Gender
Female 1
Origins
Origin of the Name
The etymology of Hera's name is genuinely disputed among scholars, with proposed links to a root meaning lady or mistress, to the Greek word for season or year, and to no securely reconstructed root at all, leaving the question unresolved despite her status as one of the most prominent Olympians. 1
Sources
Textual Note
The Heraion of Samos housed a wooden cult image, the xoanon, that ancient sources describe being ritually washed in the sea each year and dressed in a robe, a rite called the Tonaia that reenacted, in one ancient account, a mock abduction and recovery of the image itself. 2
Attributions
Mythic Association
Her hostility toward Heracles, born of one of Zeus's affairs, went beyond mere resentment: she sent serpents to kill him in his cradle, and later drove him mad so that he killed his own children, the crime whose penance became the Twelve Labors. 2
Attestation
Era of Attestation
1400 BCE to 400 CE 1
Veneration Today
Historically attested; no continuous cult 1
Historicity
Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 2
Belief
Theology
Polytheistic: many gods 2
Position Profile
Key Text
Ancient sources credit Hera with implacable hostility toward Heracles from before his birth onward, delaying his delivery so a rival infant could claim the throne prophesied for him and later sending serpents into his cradle, a persecution traced to his descent from one of Zeus's extramarital unions. 2
Learn More
The Oldest Temples in Greece

At Samos a striking ritual attached to Hera's cult image: ancient sources describe a festival called the Tonaia, at which her wooden cult statue, an old-style xoanon rather than a fully sculptural image, was ritually removed from the temple, in some accounts hidden or symbolically taken away, and then found, washed on the shore and returned in procession, an annual reenactment scholars connect to myths of Hera's own courtship or marriage to Zeus rather than to any simple washing rite. The practice is known mainly through later Greek writers describing older Samian custom, but it points to a cult considerably stranger and more ritually elaborate than the marble sanctuary remains alone would suggest.

Hera's image itself changed as much as the rites around it. The earliest cult statues across Greece were rigid, column-like wooden xoana with only the barest suggestion of a human face and form, typical of the most archaic phase of Greek religious sculpture. By the Classical period the Argive Heraion housed a fully realised chryselephantine statue by the sculptor Polykleitos, gold and ivory over a wooden core, showing an enthroned Hera with a pomegranate in one hand and a sceptre topped by a cuckoo in the other; Pausanias, who saw it centuries later, left the fullest ancient description of a statue that no longer survives in any form.

Goddess of Marriage and the Phases of a Woman's Life

Modern scholars of Greek religion have increasingly read Hera's mythic reputation as a jealous, punishing wife less as evidence of her original character and more as a later literary treatment imposed on a goddess whose cult, as her early and enormous temples suggest, once commanded independent, sovereign authority in her own right, only secondarily folded into a genealogy that made her Zeus's wife and subordinate. Her persecution of Zeus's lovers and their children, Heracles above all, and of Io, whom she turns into a cow and torments with a gadfly, reads in this light as myth working to explain why so powerful a goddess appears, in the developed Olympian system, mainly in relation to a husband's infidelities rather than on her own account.

Her Roman counterpart Juno kept a more clearly independent civic identity. The festival of the Matronalia, celebrated on the first of March, honoured married women specifically, who received gifts from their husbands and made offerings to Juno Lucina, her aspect as protector of childbirth, in a rite that has been compared to a Roman Mother's Day centuries before the modern holiday existed. Together with her place in the Capitoline Triad, Juno's civic and domestic honours in Rome preserve, in a Roman idiom, something closer to the independent authority Hera's own oldest sanctuaries suggest she once held in Greece.

Correspondences & Relations

Archetypes

The Ruler, Archetypes

Pantheons

Greek, Pantheons
Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Apollo, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "after Leto, driven off by the jealous Hera, could find no other place willing to receive her."

Source The Homeric HymnsAnonymous; ascribed in antiquity to Homer
Ares, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "tradition Ares is the son of Zeus and Hera, embodying the brutal and chaotic aspect of warfare in contrast to his half sister Athena's disciplined strategy."

Source The Homeric HymnsAnonymous; ascribed in antiquity to Homer
Cancer, Religious Symbols

This source names Hera directly: "The Greek myth gives the crab that Hera sent to nip Heracles during his fight with the Hydra, set among the stars for its trouble."

Source The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian CultureFrancesca Rochberg
Cronus, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "child Rhea bears him, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon in turn, warned by Gaia and Uranos that his own son would depose him exactly as he had deposed Uranos; Rhea saves the youngest, Zeus..."

Source TheogonyHesiod
Hephaestus, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "cast down from Olympus by his mother Hera for his deformity, in some accounts thrown a second time by Zeus during a quarrel between his parents."

Source The Homeric HymnsAnonymous; ascribed in antiquity to Homer
Hera (Wikipedia), Sources

This source names Hera directly: "General reference article on Hera, consulted 2026-08-11."

Source Hera (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Hercules (1997), Screen Works

This source names Hera directly: "voices Zeus and Samantha Eggar voices Hera."

Source Wikipedia, "Hercules (1997 film)"
Hydra, Mythical Creatures

Hesiod has Hera raise the Hydra expressly as an adversary for Heracles.

Source TheogonyHesiod
Juno, Religious Symbols

This source names Hera directly: "of Jupiter, whose Greek counterpart is Hera."

Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Leto, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "from land to land by the jealous Hera, who forbids any soil under the sun to receive her, and region after region refuses her out of fear."

Source The Homeric HymnsAnonymous; ascribed in antiquity to Homer
Linear B, Scripts & Magical Alphabets

This source names Hera directly: "but their offering lists name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus and Artemis some five hundred years before Homer, which established that those gods were worshipped in the Bronze Age and not..."

Source The Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick
Oceanus, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "the gods themselves arose, and has Hera invent a visit to the pair, to mend their marriage, as her cover story for slipping away to seduce Zeus during the Trojan War."

Source TheogonyHesiod
Rhea, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "When each child she bears him, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon, is swallowed at birth on Cronus's fear of being overthrown, Rhea travels to Crete to bear her sixth child, Zeus, in secret..."

Source TheogonyHesiod
Tethys, Figures

This source names Hera directly: "In the Iliad, Hera tells Zeus that Rhea gave her to Oceanus and Tethys to raise in their own house when Cronus was overthrown, and Hera's plan in that same scene is to visit the couple and mend..."

Source TheogonyHesiod

Child Of

Cronus, Deities

Hera is named among the six children Rhea bore to Cronus.

Source TheogonyHesiod
Rhea, Deities

Hera is named among the six children Rhea bore to Cronus.

Source TheogonyHesiod

Children

Ares, Deities

Hera bore Ares to Zeus.

Source TheogonyHesiod
Eileithyia, Deities

Hera bore Eileithyia to Zeus.

Source TheogonyHesiod
Hephaestus, Deities

Hera bore Hephaestus. Hesiod is explicit that Hera bore him alone, without union, in answer to the birth of Athena.

Source TheogonyHesiod

Depicted In

Hera Farnese, Sacred Art & Iconography
Source Hera Farnese, Wikipedia

Identified with (Interpretatio)

Uni, Deities

Uni is identified by the Etruscans and Romans with the Greek Hera; the gold Pyrgi tablets record a dedication to Uni identified also with the Phoenician Astarte.

Source The Religion of the EtruscansNancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon (eds.)

Interpretatio Of

Juno, Deities

Interpretatio romana: the Romans identified their Juno with the Greek Hera, queen of the gods and goddess of marriage.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

Married To

Zeus, Deities

Hera is the last of the wives Zeus takes, and the one who shares his throne.

Source TheogonyHesiod

Sacred to This Deity

Ladon, Mythical Creatures

Set by Hera to guard the golden apples, a wedding gift from Gaia she prized.

Source The Library (Bibliotheca)Pseudo-Apollodorus

Same Figure, Narrative Entry

Hera, Figures

Worshipped In

Ancient Greek Religion, Religions
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Ancient Greeks, Cultures

Hera, guardian of marriage, held great sanctuaries at Argos and Samos.

Source Greek ReligionWalter Burkert
Sources
1. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition
Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2012s.v. HeraView the Source
2. Greek Religion
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1985III.2.7 HeraView the Source
2. Greek Religion
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1985the Heraia and the goddess of marriageView the Source
3. Theogony
HesiodTheogony, lines 19-20, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White
Quote, Theogony, lines 19-20, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White
Earth, too, and great Oceanus, and dark Night, and the holy race of all the other deathless ones that are for ever.
View the Source
Iliad
HomerIliad, Book 1, lines 35-37, tr. A.T. Murray
Quote, Iliad, Book 1, lines 35-37, tr. A.T. Murray
Hear me, god of the silver bow, who stand over Chryse and holy Cilla, and rule mightily over Tenedos, Sminthian god
View the Source
The Homeric Hymns
Anonymous; ascribed in antiquity to HomerThe Homeric Hymns, Hymn 1 to Dionysus, lines 19-20, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White
Quote, The Homeric Hymns, Hymn 1 to Dionysus, lines 19-20, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White
Be favorable, O Insewn, Inspirer of frenzied women! we singers sing of you as we begin and as we end a strain.
View the Source
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. HeraView the Source
Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History
Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Cambridge University Press, 1998View the Source

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