Source Verification: Hera

Why is Hera so often hostile toward Zeus's children by other women?

Hera is the goddess of legitimate marriage, and Zeus's affairs are a standing violation of the institution she embodies, so the sources treat her anger as consistent with her role rather than as simple spite. Her targets are not random: she pursues Heracles, the Trojan-War-era heroes born of Zeus's unions, and Dionysus's household because each birth is a visible, lasting reminder of a marriage broken.

Source: Homer, Iliad 14.153-353

What children did Hera have with Zeus?

Hesiod names Ares, Hebe, and Eileithyia as children Hera bore to Zeus within their marriage. Eileithyia in particular matters beyond her own myths, since she is the goddess of childbirth invoked, and sometimes deliberately delayed, at the birth of other figures in the tradition, including at Heracles's own birth.

Source: Hesiod, Theogony 921-923

How was Hephaestus born, and why does the story matter?

Hesiod says Hera bore Hephaestus by herself, without union with Zeus, specifically because she was angry that Zeus had produced Athena alone from his own head. The story is told as an answer in kind: each parent demonstrates that a child of theirs does not require the other. It also sits behind Hephaestus's uneasy relationship with both parents in later myth, since he is thrown from Olympus at least once for taking his mother's side in a quarrel with Zeus.

Source: Hesiod, Theogony 927-929

How did Hera try to stop Heracles from being born as the ruling king promised by Zeus?

Zeus swore an oath that a descendant of Perseus born that day would rule all his kin, meaning the unborn Heracles. Hera tricked him into the wording, then hastened the premature birth of another descendant, Eurystheus, while holding back Alcmene's labor, so that Eurystheus was born first and took the kingship instead. This is also the origin of Heracles later serving Eurystheus rather than the reverse.

Source: Homer, Iliad 19.95-133

Did Hera and Zeus's marriage ever break down entirely?

The Iliad shows a genuinely adversarial marriage rather than a settled one: in Book 14, Hera borrows Aphrodite's girdle of persuasion specifically to seduce and distract Zeus so she can secretly help the Greeks at Troy against his stated wishes, and the scheme works exactly as she plans it. Their disputes are recurring enough across the epic that Zeus at one point threatens her with violence for interfering, which the poem treats as an ordinary, if tense, feature of their relationship rather than as an isolated crisis.

Source: Homer, Iliad 14.153-223

• Homer, Iliad 14.153-223
• Homer, Iliad 19.95-133
• Hesiod, Theogony 921-929

• Joan V. O'Brien, The Transformation of Hera (1993)
• Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth (1993)