Hera

Hera was queen of the Olympian gods, sister and wife of Zeus, and the guardian of marriage, women and the family across the Greek world. Her worship reached back to Mycenaean Greece, where her name appears as “e-ra” on Linear B tablets from Pylos and Thebes around 1300–1200 BCE — older than Zeus’s own attested cult at some sites and older than Athens itself. Her two great sanctuaries anchored the cult on opposite sides of the Aegean: the Heraion of Argos, one of the oldest shared sanctuaries on the Greek mainland, and the Heraion of Samos, which grew by the 6th century BCE into one of the largest temples ever built for a Greek god — large enough that Herodotus singled it out as the biggest he knew. Myth cast her as jealous and vindictive toward Zeus’s lovers and children, tormenting Io, delaying Leto’s labor, and turning on the infant and later the grown Heracles, but her civic role was serious business: as protector of legitimate marriage and childbirth, she was invoked at weddings and in the rites of women throughout the Greek world, and her loss to Aphrodite in the Judgement of Paris was blamed for tipping Troy into a war that ended the city.

Her cult ended where the others did. Theodosius I’s edicts of 391–392 CE banned pagan sacrifice outright and forbade entry to temples, cutting off the rites that sustained her sanctuaries at Argos and Samos; within a few centuries the Samos temple was picked apart for building stone, leaving a single standing column amid its foundations. As Juno she persisted a while longer in Roman civic religion before falling to the same decrees. She is remembered now as a stock figure of jealousy and rage in retellings of Greek myth — the vengeful wife rather than the queen who once outranked every goddess but one. Dominance is not eternal: the deity who commanded fidelity from an unfaithful king could not command a single sacrifice past 392 CE.