Hera Gives the Queen of the Gods Her Due

Jennifer Saint is known for writing about Greek mythology, though her books tend to focus on lesser-known, underserved, or overshadowed female characters from across the pantheon of gods and heroes. Her latest effort, Hera, breaks that pattern by turning to the most powerful and likely well-known of all Greek goddesses and attempting to tell the story of the Queen of Olympus herself. 

The thing about Hera, though, is that while she appears in many famous Greek myths and stories, including the labors of Hercules, the voyage of the Argonauts, the Judgement of Paris that precipitates the Trojan War, and Homer’s Illiad, she’s generally presented in a negative light. Hera, to put it bluntly, is a bitch. Goddess of marriage and childbirth, she spends most of her immortal life feuding with her husband’s seemingly endless string of mistresses and lovers, tracking down his illegitimate progeny, and plotting vengeance against them all. She’s petty and jealous, aloof and cruel. And almost all of the myths that prominently feature Hera are stories that are really about Zeus, offering her the chance to do little more than victim-blame women who catch her husband’s eye.

Saint’s retelling works to change all that, adding much-needed nuance and depth to a figure that has long between portrayed in the shallowest of terms. Her Hera is still jealous and paranoid, and generally awful to those around her, even and perhaps most especially her children. But Hera takes great pains to provide the necessary context for her behavior and deepen her emotional responses to something that feels much less straightforward than simple jealousy. This Hera is furious, often just incandescent with rage, constantly rattling the bars of the gilded cage that is Olympus. But while Hera has always been known for her wrath, Saint deftly fleshes out the reasons behind her anger adding layers and complexity until it becomes glaringly apparent that there’s so much more going on there than a philandering spouse. 

Hera begins, well, at the beginning. Almost. The book opens with the fall of the Titans, when Zeus and the other Olympians overthrew their father Cronus, and the other age-old beings who fought alongside him. Triumphant, they begin building the palace known as Mount Olympus, a place where they are all meant to rule as equals, seated on twelve identical thrones. It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that this celestial harmony is short-lived. Almost immediately, Zeus begins assigning various realms to his siblings: Poseidon gets the sea, Hades the underworld, Hestia, the hearth, and Demeter the harvest. Hera essentially gets sexually assaulted into marrying Zeus. It’s not a great trade-off. 

Doubly so because we’ve already seen what Hera’s truly capable of. She’s a warrior and a leader, with egalitarian ideas about what the reign of the Olympians should look like. Instead, she is forced to marry her brother to maintain some semblance of power over the world she helped create and is made the goddess of an institution (marriage) her husband doesn’t even respect. (And whose tenants pretty much he flouts on the daily.) As the power in Olympus coalesces around its men, Hera determines that she will do whatever it takes to bring him down and reclaim the power that has been taken from her.

Saint deftly weaves in plenty of other myths and origin stories throughout Hera’s tale, exploring her relationships with other characters and their perspectives on her choices. From her bizarre rivalry with Zeus’s daughter Athena to her warm bond with hearth goddess Hestia and her outright distaste for Apollo and his twin Artemis, there’s plenty of interfamilial drama to enjoy, and the larger group’s general pettiness and constant scheming with and around one another adds an entertaining, almost soapy element we haven’t seen in Saint’s writing before. The book excels, however, when it asks Hera to confront her own otherness—-her lack of interest in her children beyond whether or not they might be effective tools against their father, her complicated bond with the snake goddess Echidna, her sympathy toward Echnidna’s monstrous children, and her general disinterest in the lives of the humans who worship her.  (Though, notably, that last bit changes considerably in intriguing and moving ways by the book’s conclusion.)

Hera isn’t interested in absolving the eponymous goddess of her worst behavior. No, the story is surprisingly honest about how purposefully cruel she is, how frequently she uses her power and influence to punch down at wronged injured women, rather than hold her repugnant husband responsible for his actions. But this book also has some interesting things to say about mythmaking and legend, and how stories are formed that may or may not resemble the events that actually happened. Hera has a genuine self-awareness about how some of her choices will be perceived, either by the other gods or the mortals who spin her deeds into legend, and she knows that she’s going to be the villain in her own story more often than not. 

Hera will likely never be anyone’s favorite figure from Greek mythology. But thanks to Saint’s Hera—and the depth and interiority its story grants her—she might not be quite so many people’s least favorite anymore. 

Hera is available now wherever books are sold. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB