Astronomy Online - Zeus (Jupiter) and His Wife

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Zeus (Jupiter) and His Wife

Zeus Hera (Juno), known to us chiefly as the wife of Zeus, was a daughter of Cronus and Rhea. Born on the islands of Samos or, some say, at Argos, she was brought up in Arcadia by Temenus, son of Pelasgus. The Seasons were her nurses. After banishing their father Cronus, Hera's twin-brother Zeus sought her out at Gnossus in Crete or, some say, on Mount Thornax (now called Cuckoo Mountain) in Argolis, where he courted her, at first unsuccessfully. She took pity on him only when he adopted the disguise of a bedraggled cuckoo, and tenderly warmed him in her bosom. There he at once resumed his true shape and ravished her, so that she was shamed into marrying him.
Hera and Zeus spent their wedding night on Samos, and it lasted three hundred years. Hera bathes regularly in the spring of Canathus, near Argos, and thus renews her virginity.
Hera Zeus and Hera bickered constantly. Vexed by his infidelities, she often humiliated him by her scheming ways. Zeus never fully trusted Hera, and she knew that if offended beyond a certain point he would flog or even hurl a thunderbolt at her. She therefore resorted to ruthless intrigue, as in the matter of Hercules's birth; and sometimes borrowed Aphrodite's girdle, to excite his passion and thus weaken his will.
A time came when Zeus's pride and petulance became so intolerable that Hera, Poseidon, Apollo, and all the other Olympians, except Hestia, surrounded him suddenly as he lay asleep on his couch and bound him with rawhide thongs, knotted into a hundred knots, so that he could not move. He threatened them with instant death, but they had placed his thunderbolt out of reach and laughed insultingly at him. While they were celebrating their victory, and jealously discussing who was to be his successor, Thetis the Nereid, foreseeing a civil war on Olympus, hurried in search of the hundred-handed Briareus, who swiftly united the thongs, using every hand at once, and released his mater. Because it was Hera who had led the conspiracy against him, Zeus hung her up from the sky with a gold bracelet about either wrist and an anvil fastened to either ankle. The other deities were vexed beyong words, but dared attempt no rescue for all her piteous cries. In the end Zeus undertook to free her if they swore never more to rebel against him; and Apollo by sending them as bond-servants to King Laomedon, for whom they built the city of Troy; but he pardoned the others as having acted under duress.