Wife of Zeus and Guardian of Marriage

Hera was a daughter of Cronus and Rhea, swallowed at birth like her siblings and freed when Zeus forced their father to disgorge them after the Titanomachy. She became Zeus's wife and, in most tellings, his last and principal consort, presiding as queen of the Olympian gods over marriage, women and childbirth even as her own marriage became a byword in Greek myth for jealousy and strife. Zeus fathered children by a long series of other goddesses and mortal women, and Hera's anger at these unions drives a large share of Greek mythology's plots: she persecuted Heracles from before his birth to well into his adult labors specifically because he was Zeus's son by the mortal Alcmene, sent madness upon him that led him to kill his own children, and later obstructed him at nearly every turn of the labors imposed on him afterward. She played a comparably hostile role toward other lovers and offspring of Zeus, including Io, whom she is said to have transformed into a cow and set the many eyed giant Argus to guard, and Leto, whom she prevented from finding a place to give birth to Apollo and Artemis until the floating island of Delos took her in. After the messenger god Hermes killed Argus to free Io on Zeus's orders, Hera is said to have taken the giant's hundred eyes and set them into the tail of the peacock, the bird kept sacred to her ever since.