Modern scholars of Greek religion have increasingly read Hera's mythic reputation as a jealous, punishing wife less as evidence of her original character and more as a later literary treatment imposed on a goddess whose cult, as her early and enormous temples suggest, once commanded independent, sovereign authority in her own right, only secondarily folded into a genealogy that made her Zeus's wife and subordinate. Her persecution of Zeus's lovers and their children, Heracles above all, and of Io, whom she turns into a cow and torments with a gadfly, reads in this light as myth working to explain why so powerful a goddess appears, in the developed Olympian system, mainly in relation to a husband's infidelities rather than on her own account.
Her Roman counterpart Juno kept a more clearly independent civic identity. The festival of the Matronalia, celebrated on the first of March, honoured married women specifically, who received gifts from their husbands and made offerings to Juno Lucina, her aspect as protector of childbirth, in a rite that has been compared to a Roman Mother's Day centuries before the modern holiday existed. Together with her place in the Capitoline Triad, Juno's civic and domestic honours in Rome preserve, in a Roman idiom, something closer to the independent authority Hera's own oldest sanctuaries suggest she once held in Greece.