by Tony Narloch

Created on: June 14, 2009

Hera was the queen of Mount Olympus and had to contend with her husbands's (Zeus) many indiscretions. With his womanising and lustful ways, multiple affairs and sheer ingenuity when it came to cheating on his wife, it is rather ironic that Hera was the patron god of marriage, and equally understandable why Hera was so resentful towards the women that Zeus committed adultery with. That said, when it came to exacting revenge and meting out punishment, Hera was neither stingy nor discrimantory in this regard, only too willing to pursue vendettas and grudges with a pathological passion that was quite unnerving. Even the hero Heracles had to contend with her machinations, and even the most smallest of slights was enough to incure the wrath of Hera and the Trojan prince, Paris, who voted against her when she was in a beauty contest also had to contend with her hatred.Petty, vindicative and downright cruel, Hera represented the scorned woman in the most archetypical of senses.

Whilst Hera was looked upon and beatified as the very essence of all that Greek women should and could be, Hera was not especially well known for her devotion to her children, or any other inclination of her maternal instinct. Hera was more than willing to drag innocent parties into a vendetta, for example in an attempt to get her own back on Zeus who had fathered Athena without her, Hera had an affair as well. The resulting offspring of that union was Hepheateus and Hera was said to be so utterly repulsed by his ugliness that she casually tossed him out of Mount Olympus. He fell for a total of ten days and nights, until eventually he crashed onto earth, where his legs were shattered and he was left lame and crippled as a result. Ugly both in appearance as well as demeanour, and having inherited his mother's capacity for petty vengeance, he set about creating a throne which as soon as Hera sat upon, she would be totally unable to leave from.

Despite being named in her honour as well as the fact that she was his stepmother, Heracles was the arch nemesis of Hera, and she tried even from his birth to kill him. As a young baby, she sent serpents in a botched attempt to poison the baby, but Heracles's infamous strength was already well developed and he was able to strangle the snakes with no difficulty. Enraged that Heracles had defied her by failing to die as she had planned, she then orchestrated a series of events that culminated in Heracles being forced to undertake the twelve labours.

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