Hera

Hera was the daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, and sister to Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, and Hestia. Like her siblings, she was swallowed by Cronus at birth and later freed when Zeus overthrew their father. Hesiod records her marriage to Zeus and their children together - Ares, Hebe, and Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth - placing her at the center of Olympian family life as queen and as the goddess who oversees legitimate marriage.

Hera was renowned for her jealousy and wrath toward Zeus's numerous lovers and their offspring, and this persecution supplies some of Greek myth's longest hero cycles: she drove Heracles to madness so that he killed his own family, forcing the labors that follow; she pursued Leto across every land before Apollo and Artemis could be born; she cursed the nymph Echo to only ever repeat others' last words, punishment for distracting her with long stories while other nymphs' affairs with Zeus went undetected, in the opening turn of Narcissus and Echo, where Ovid first shows Echo watching Narcissus drive deer into nets; and she drove Dionysus's nurses mad to punish Semele's child. In Pausanias she also turns the huntress Callisto into a bear, and Artemis shoots it to please her. Her anger was not always simply jealousy over infidelity - when Zeus produced Athena from his own head without her, Hesiod says Hera responded in kind, bearing Hephaestus by herself, without union with Zeus at all.

In Roman religion, Hera was identified with Juno, who held an even more prominent civic role as protector of the Roman state and guardian of women through every stage of life. Later traditions increasingly emphasized Hera as a symbol of marital fidelity and queenly dignity, softening the vindictiveness that dominates her role in the earlier myths.