Hera

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.

Hera's worship centered on some of the oldest and most substantial sanctuaries in the entire Greek world, at Argos and at Samos, sites whose temples ranked among the largest built anywhere in Greece well before the classical period. The Heraion of Argos, on a ridge overlooking the Argive plain, served the region's leading cities as a shared religious center and is where excavation has recovered votive offerings stretching back into the Bronze Age, evidence that her cult there long predates the literary myths that later fixed her personality in marital jealousy. The Heraion of Samos grew even larger, eventually housing one of the biggest temples in the ancient Greek world, and drew offerings and dedications from across the eastern Mediterranean, a scale that marks Hera there as a major regional goddess of the island rather than only a jealous consort in someone else's story. Festivals in her honor, generally called Heraia, were held in numerous Greek cities and typically centered on marriage, fertility and the passage of young women into adult womanhood, a civic role that sat alongside, and was largely independent of, the mythological Hera whose feuds with Zeus's other lovers fill so much surviving poetry.