era was the wife of Zeus, and also his sister, and sister to Hades, Poseidon, and Hestia. Hera was the daughter of Cronus and Rhea. The Titans, Oceanus and Tethys brought her up on the Ionian Island of Samos. When war broke out between the Titans and the gods, she returned to Samos to live with her adoptive parents. She was the protector of marriage, and married women were her peculiar care. She is described in an early poem as:

"Golden throned Hera, among immortals the queen,
chief among them in beauty, the glorious lady,
all the blessed in high Olympus revere,
honour even as Zeus, the lord of thunder"

Hera had four children by Zeus, they were:

At first, Hera was simply Zeus’ wife, and as such she was inferior to him in position and power and had to obey his commands. It was only later that she became the queen of the heavens, of gods and men, as he was king. In her lower rank, she was frequently humiliated and punished by her husband. He punished her after a violent quarrel in which Hephaestus sought to interfere on her behalf, and threw his son out of Olympus, thus laming him. Zeus again punished Hera, when he found out that she was implicated, with Athene and Poseidon, in a plan to put him in chains.

It appears that Hera was mainly engaged in punishing the many women that Zeus fell in love with, even when they yielded only because he coerced or tricked them. It made no difference to Hera how reluctant any of them were, or how innocent, the goddess treated them all the same. Hera's implacable anger followed them and their children too. She never forgot an injury. The Trojan War would have ended in an honourable peace, with both sides remaining unconquered if it had not been for her hatred of a Paris, a Trojan who had judged Aphrodite lovelier than she. The wrong of her slighted beauty remained with her until Troy lay in ruins.

Sacred to her, were the peacock, the crow, the cuckoo (in which form Zeus wooed and won her) and the pomegranate (that Persephone ate) as a symbol of married love and productivity. Like Zeus, she sent clouds, storms, thunder and lightning. Her attendants were the Horae, the lovely goddesses who saw to it that the Seasons came round, as they should, and Iris, the virgin goddess of the rainbow who, as a messenger of the gods, was the counterpart of Hermes. She is represented as holding a sceptre in one hand and a pomegranate in the other, or seated on her throne, wearing a crown decorated by figures of The Graces and The Seasons.