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Chapter 3 - From Anger to Glory

Testing and Legitimising

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2022

Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge
Affiliation:
Collège de France, Paris
Gabriella Pironti
Affiliation:
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris
Raymond Geuss
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Fritz Graf
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Summary

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.

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Chapter
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The Hera of Zeus
Intimate Enemy, Ultimate Spouse
, pp. 232 - 317
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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