Myth made Hera a jealous wife, but Greeks built her their earliest great temples
In the myths, Hera is mostly remembered for hounding Zeus's lovers and their children. Archaeology tells a grander story. She may have been the first deity to receive a roofed Greek temple, on Samos around 800 BCE, and pilgrims brought her offerings from as far away as Babylon, Assyria and Egypt.
Hera was the queen of the Olympians, daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, and both sister and wife of Zeus. She presided over lawful marriage, blessing weddings and guarding women in childbirth, and art showed her as a dignified, crowned matron, sometimes veiled like a married woman, sometimes holding a pomegranate. Her creatures were the cow, the cuckoo and the peacock, and the Romans knew her as Juno. Her name already appears on Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Pylos and Thebes, but its origin is unknown. Suggestions include a feminine of hero, meaning mistress, or a word for a young cow; ancient guesses linking it to season, beloved or air are no longer taken seriously.
The cow connection runs deep. Homer repeatedly calls her cow-eyed lady Hera, and the same epithet turns up in Linear B. Some scholars think she began as a Mediterranean nature and fertility goddess who became the bride of the Greek sky god, and their sacred marriage was acted out in festivals. On Samos her image was hidden among willows for worshippers to find, and at Plataia the Daedala fire festival retold her quarrel with Zeus and their reconciliation. Parallels have been drawn with Near Eastern cow goddesses such as the Egyptian Hathor.
Her heartland was the northeastern Peloponnese, above all Argos, whose people Pindar called hers and which literature named the house of Hera. In the Iliad she names Argos, Sparta and Mycenae as her favourite cities. The oldest temple at Olympia was hers, and months were named after her at Delphi and elsewhere. The sanctuaries at Samos and Argos were the first monumental Greek temples, built in the eighth century BCE.
Samos later raised one of the largest of all Greek temples on the site, with a forest of 155 columns in one phase. At Paestum in southern Italy, a Doric temple credited for generations to Poseidon was recognised during the 1950s as hers. Set beside such monuments, the historian Walter Burkert judged the nagging wife of the myths an almost comic figure.
Source: Hera
