Hera on Homer’s Epics of Troy

08/02/2022

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Hera (or Here), who is described as “cow-eyed”, “white-armed” or “golden throne” in the Homeric epics, is a typical Greek goddess, that is, the symbol of the Greek peninsula’s race, lineage, religion and world views, interests, and a more advanced culture.

She is an unpleasant goddess who defends against the Aegean and Anatolia, so her personality and legends always reflect an atmosphere of quarrel, grudge, resentment and discord. Hera portrays woman with all her flaws: She is nagging, jealous, vicious, stubborn, schemes, but has nothing to do with it, runs water under straw, does what she does in secret, her love and hate are based on no logic, she does not hesitate to abuse her weapons and powers, by analogy, it symbolizes the wealthy and selfish bourgeois woman, whose examples are always and especially in our time. It is Homer who put this stamp on the great Hera, the wife of Zeus, the queen of the gods, but strangely enough, the portrait of Hera drawn by the great Ionian poet has taken hold and appears with the same type in the myths created in Greece. Let’s listen to Hera from the mouth of her husband Zeus (Il. VIII. 407):

Not much, my anger, my hatred for Here,
It’s his habit to interfere with everything I do.

After seducing Zeus and putting him to sleep in order to turn the Trojan war to the side of the Achaeans, the god suddenly woke up and scolds his wife (Il. XV, 14 ff.):

But you set up a scheme, it won’t work
here,
You dismissed the divine Hector, you defeated the army.
You bear the fruit of this evil
before you collect
Let me beat you up and see.
Did you forget that I hung you in the air
day,
I tied an anvil to both feet,
I struck an unbreakable gold chain
to your hands,
hanging, you were in the air, clouds
between.

Zeus gave this punishment to Hera because of the evil he had done to Heracles. The god of gods sees in his son Ares the same flaws as his mother. Other gods think more or less like Zeus; Even Hephaestus, trying to protect his mother against his father Zeus, cannot forget what he suffered from Hera.

BIRTH, LIFE STORY. Hera is the daughter of Kronos and Rheia and the sister of Zeus and other Olympian gods. Her father Kronos swallows her as soon as she is born, and then vomits. After Zeus shares world domination, he takes Hera as his wife. According to Hesiod, Zeus was the last of the goddesses to marry Hera.

Hera herself tells in the Iliad that she spent her childhood with the gods Oceanus and Tethys at the ends of the world (Il. XIV. 200 ff.). Her mother Rheia entrusted her to Oceanus and Tethys during the war of the Titans, and they raised Hera, so much so that during the Trojan war, the cow-eyed goddess wanted to go to the west coast to calm down a fight between Oceanos and Tethys.

Zeus and Hera made love even before they were married, but then their wedding was celebrated with a ceremony. The sacred wedding (hieros gamos) between the greatest god couple is a frequent motif in both myths and cults. According to a legend, this wedding took place in the garden of the Western Girls (Hesperides), and Gaia gave the golden apples from that garden to Hera as a wedding gift. While Hera was on the shores of Oceanus, she planted the apples in the garden of the Western Girls with her own hands, and the reunion scene on the Gargaros hill of Mount Ida in the Iliad is such a holy wedding. It is worth summarizing this unique part of the epic (11. XIV, 152-353): Hera sees that her husband Zeus was leading the Trojan war from Mount Ida and the success was with the Trojans. To prevent this, she had to go and make love to him at the top of the mountain, she goes to her room first. adorns herself beautifully, then asks Aphrodite for her magical breastplate that ignites love, and after she puts it on her breast, Sleep seduces the god and with him reaches the climax of Gargaros:

Zeus gathering the clouds saw him,
as soon as i see love embraced thoughtful
his head,
such a love the day they first met
had heard, the day they came out in secret from their parents.
To bed…

Zeus asks his wife where she is going, and she pretends to be innocent and says that she went to reconcile the couple of sea gods on the shore of Oceanos and first came here to inform her husband and get permission from him. Zeus can’t stand it, he forgets about war and so on and reveals his feelings:

Then you go there, what happens Hera?
let’s go to bed, let’s hug
in bed, to the fullest,
neither a goddess nor a
against woman
The love that flows into my heart is so upset
didn’t make me…

Then he counts, one by one, the mortal and immortal women he has slept with. Hera does not make a sound, but it is obvious that honey is dripping into it. He is quite coy and shy:

Terrible son of Kronos, what kind of word
out of your mouth?
How do you want us to lie in bed and make love?
On top of Mount Ida, in plain sight?
What if an ever-present god sees us,
If he goes away while we sleep, the other
to the gods?
I can’t set foot in your house again
How do I get out of this bed?

Like Zeus, let us be astonished at Hera’s reluctance to sleep with her own husband like an ordinary woman and fear of gossip. Anyway, Zeus finds a cure for this too:

Gods, don’t be afraid that people will see,
I cover us all around us with a mist like gold,
not even the sun can see us past it, who sees everything with its sharp light
even the sun.
He said so, took his wife to his bosom, hugged him.
the divine earth released a soft grass.
Fresh lotos laid a carpet between them and the earth,
a sweet carpet of saffron, hyacinths,
they both lay down on the carpet,
A beautiful golden cloud enveloped them,
Dewdrops flowed brightly from the cloud.

Go to the top of Kazdag today, and you will see huge, flat stones laid out like a tray with herbs sprouting between them, and you think that the gods are making love on these green carpets.

LEGENDS. Hera does not have a direct legend, but she plays a role in the love of Zeus, interferes with them, especially
He does not let go of the children born out of these loves, he watches them with hatred and anger throughout their lives. His first and greatest victim was Heracles, whom Alcmene gave birth to from Zeus. It is Hera who forces the mighty valiant to perform heroic acts one after the other, and plays a role in blinding Teiresias in the legends of Io, Epaphos, Ino and Athamas, Dionysus and Tityos. Not being able to win the first place in the Three Beauties competition is a reason for the endless grudge against Paris and Troy. On the other hand; Jealous of Achilles’ mother Thetis, she keeps her son Achilles for raising her. A legend tells that he made Menelaus immortal.

He participated in the war against the giants. Meanwhile, Porphyrion had a crush on him and grabbed the end of his robe and wanted to pull him to himself, at that time Zeus knocked the giant to the ground with a lightning bolt. Iksion also wanted to unite with Hera, but Zeus deceived her by making a cloud image of Hera.

Hera assisted the Argo sailors in the Argonauts expedition, enabling them to cross dangerous passages.

The peacock is the favorite bird of the goddess Hera, who watches over the births with her daughter Eileithyia. The eye-eye feathers symbolized the facial eyes of Argos, whom the goddess placed as a guard for Io. He loved the pomegranate as a fruit and the lily as a flower.

In Rome, Hera was equated with the goddess Juno.