white-armed Hera
Queen of the gods and goddess of marriage, famous for her fury at Zeus‘s lovers and their children. She hated Troy after losing the Judgement of Paris.
Roman name: Juno
From Mount Olympus. Today: Mount Olympus, Greece.
Strength 8/10 · Wisdom 9/10 · Courage 8/10 · Divinity 10/10 · Fame 9/10
The story
Queen of the gods, wife and sister of Zeus, and goddess of marriage. Losing the Judgement of Paris made her Troy‘s bitterest enemy. In book 14 she borrows Aphrodite‘s magic girdle to charm Zeus to sleep, so the Greeks can fight back.
How it ends
She did not rest until Troy lay in ruins.
Still with us today
The Romans called her Juno, and the month of June is probably named after her.
Family
- Parents: Cronus, Rhea
- Partners: Zeus
- Children: Ares, Hephaestus, Hebe
- Siblings: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, Hestia, Chiron
Appears in
The Olympians, The Trojan War, Heracles, Jason and the Argonauts
Read about them in the Library
- Iliad 1: The quarrel
- Iliad 4: The truce is broken
- Iliad 8: The tide turns
- Iliad 14: Hera deceives Zeus
- Iliad 15: The Trojans reach the ships
- Iliad 19: Achilles and Agamemnon reconciled
- Iliad 21: The battle at the river
- Theogony and Works and Days 4: The birth of Zeus, and Prometheus
- Theogony and Works and Days 6: The wives and children of Zeus
- Homeric Hymns 2: Hymn to Apollo
- Homeric Hymns 5: The shorter hymns
- Library of Apollodorus 6: Io, the Danaids and Bellerophon
- and 15 more parts of the Library
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony
- Homer, Iliad
Hera is a playable card in MythoTroy, the Trojan War card game.
In the sky and in space
- ConstellationCancer
The crab that Hera sent to nip Heracles's toes while he fought the Hydra. He crushed it, and Hera put it in the stars.
- ConstellationUrsa Major
The Great Bear, which includes the Plough. The story says the nymph Callisto, loved by Zeus, was turned into a bear and set among the stars.
- AsteroidsJuno
The third asteroid ever found, in 1804, named after the Roman queen of the gods.
- Space missionJuno
A NASA spacecraft orbiting Jupiter since 2016. In myth, Jupiter hid his mischief behind clouds, but his wife Juno could see through them, just as the spacecraft peers through Jupiter's clouds.
- Space missionHera
A European Space Agency spacecraft launched in 2024 to inspect an asteroid that NASA deliberately crashed into, to test defending Earth.