The cholos which is one of the constitutive features of Hera is at the heart of this chapter, which treats the narratives and traditions which recount conflicts involving the Hera of Zeus and certain of Zeus’s sons (e.g. Herakles, Dionysos, Hephaistos), and where her wrath is decisive for the definition of their divine prerogatives and their full integration into the Olympian order. By challenging some of Zeus’s illegitimate children, Hera works as a power of legitimation, redefining the divine family. In the world of heroes, the angry Hera is an agent of legitimation as well, but also of delegitimation, especially in cases of human sovereignty: her intervention contributes to identifying rulers whose sovereignty is rotten, as is the case with the royal family of Thebes under Oedipus, and that of Iolkos, in the epic of the Argonauts. Her interventions are nothing but actions that take charge of and realise the boulai of all the gods collectively and of her husband in particular. She does this, to be sure, in her own way, as a goddess whose characteristic is constructive opposition, but her anger remains, in the final analysis, at the service of an order guaranteed by Zeus.

This chapter analyses the narrative traditions of the archaic period and assesses some of the later echoes and survivals of these traditions. In this material Hera appears in her complex role as wife, queen, and angry goddess against the backdrop of her constitutive relation to Zeus, the divine sovereign. By analysing the connections between these three elements, it attempts to gain an inside understanding of the goddess’s wrath and its implications. Questions of rank and legitimacy, the theme of childbirth, and that of filiation are also an integral part of her prerogatives as Olympian queen. Hera is the ultimate spouse but also the intimate enemy of the king of the gods. These aspects are indissociable, and it is significant that the Greeks chose for Zeus not a submissive spouse but a genuine partner endowed with a strong sense of competitiveness and a rank comparable to his. Their preferred image is of a sovereign couple bound together in a dynamic of conflict in which disagreements and reconciliations, separations and reunions alternate. That Hera defies Zeus and sets traps for him shows how close she is to her royal husband and that she knows him better than anyone else.

This chapter deals with local narrative traditions and the ritual acts associated with local sanctuaries (to the extent to which these can be fruitfully investigated) of Hera, whose cult titles Teleia and Basileia echo how she is portrayed in the archaic epic poetry. This is notably the case at Argos, Samos, and Perachora, where important sanctuaries of the goddess are located outside the city centre, but also in Olympia, ‘the Olympus on earth’, where the first monumental temple of the Panhellenic sanctuary of Zeus is associated with her. Her cults in Plataia, Delos, Lesbos, Corinth, Athens, and western Greece shows how her roles of spouse and sovereign overlap and to some extent come to be confused because of her complex relation to Zeus. This relation is crucial to understanding the expectations of Hera’s worshippers, although in a certain number of places the connection with Zeus is not made fully explicit.

To evaluate Hera according to the criteria generally used among humans would mean making her a shrewish wife and an unworthy mother. Is there not, one might ask, a fundamental irony in taking a goddess who was so scrupulous in observing and enforcing the boundaries between the human and the divine sphere, and then subjecting her to interpretations that project onto the gods specific features of human life? The widely practised reading of Hera through the prism of an anthropomorphic morality has considerably confused and impoverished our understanding of the goddess. To maintain this interpretation, scholars have found it necessary to develop two parallel ways of reading the available evidence: limit the goddess to the role of legitimate wife in the cults of the cities and separate off the image of the ‘untamed shrew’, restricting it to traditional narratives. The consequence of this approach was to neglect a whole series of elements which do not fit into this diptych-model of the goddess. Thus Hera’s status as a sovereign was relegated to being a local echo of a past which had disappeared, whereas the status of ‘the Hera of Zeus’ as queen of Olympus was greatly underestimated in cultic contexts. In addition, the jealous and angry Hera of the mythological dictionaries, excellent as many of them are in their fashion, acted as a kind of magnet to draw in the diverse aspects of the cholos of Hera, which drastically reduced its complexity.

In 1864 a piece of masonry half hidden in the soil attracted the attention of a scholar and member of the Institut de France who was visiting the island of Thasos. In one of his letters he mentions a ‘funerary bas-relief’ depicting a figure seated on a throne, next to another who is standing up. There were several further mentions of this piece in the intervening years, but finally in 1911 Charles Picard began the excavation of the remains on the island under the auspices of the French Archaeological Institute, and he completely uncovered the piece of stone. When this was done, it turned out not to be a free-standing funereal stele but a monument which was built into one of the gates of the city. It shows a seated deity holding a sceptre, and next to it a winged figure who is about to leave. Picard thought that the seated figure was Zeus and the winged one Iris or Eileithyia, and the reason he gave for this attribution was that the full image shows a small building, perhaps a shrine, in which the bas-reliefs of the two figures are located; however, above the apex of the pediment of this building an eagle is clearly depicted. In addition, the seated figure seemed to him too masculine to be a goddess, as some of his predecessors had thought. Several decades later, the column forming the other jamb of the gate was uncovered.