>...a distinctive group of terracotta figurines from Paestum portraying a naked standing goddess [...see image 3...] In the Aegean, the iconography in question can be associated with Phoenician Astarte or Cypriot Aphrodite. In places where the Greeks and Phoenicians came in contact with one another, there is often an overlapping in the persona of the two deities; in addition, a similar conflation sometimes occurs between these two deities and Hera.

-Rebecca Miller Ammerman (1991)

(sorry for reuploading, I tried censoring the nude form for Reddit’s sensibilities. Hope you like the gods in their underwear, lol)

As you may well have gathered from my previous post, Hera is and always has been a goddess of war. But she also had a number of connections to Astarte and Aphrodite! Who's everyone's favorite war goddess, apparently. While most of this post will be quoting Ammerman's article, I'll also include some added context from ancient sources.

Hera, Astarte, Aphrodite

>Sestieri (p.151-152), who made several observations on the group of naked goddess figurines as part of his gen eral survey in 1955 of the varied iconographies found among the terracottas dedicated in the sanctuaries of Hera at Paestum, noted the general similarities between the Paestan figurines and the imagery of the Oriental goddess Astarte.

>Hera's character was much more fluid than we give her credit for. Whenever I hear people reduce her to "just a goddess of marriage" I get very confused, because Hera had some of the most varied and seemingly unrelated domains of any of her siblings (aside from Zeus ofc).

>In addition, we know from inscriptions that by the fourth century B.C., Aphrodite had become fully equated with Astarte. [...]

>In the Aegean, figurines of the naked goddess are found at sites on the island of Rhodes and at the sanctuary of Hera on Samos. [...] Schmidt, in his study of Cypriot sculptures from the Samian Heraion, argues for close ties between Cyprus, Naukratis, Rhodes, and Samos in the seventh century B.C. with regard to the exchange of sculpture as well as mold technology. The image of the naked goddess seems to have traveled within a wide circuit of exchange and contact in the south eastern Mediterranean. [...]

>The proximity of the shrines of Hera and Aphrodite at the Etruscan port of Graviscae may also be a reflection of a special alliance between the goddesses [...]

This "special alliance" between Hera and Aphrodite can also be seen in the Spartan sanctuary of Hera, where they were identified with one another. Pausanias 3.13.8-9

>Not far from the hero-shrine [of the Dioscuri] is a hill, and on the hill a temple of Argive Hera, set up, they say, by Eurydice, the daughter of Lacedaemon [...] An old wooden image they call that of Hera-Aphrodite. A mother is wont to sacrifice to the goddess when a daughter is married.

back to the article:

>In thinking about the identity of the goddess who presided over the sanctuary, we may also want to consider in greater depth the possible conflation of the persona of Hera with that of Astarte and Aphrodite. [...]

>In a wider context, the dedication of an image of the naked goddess in a sanctuary of Hera is by no means uncommon. We have already seen that figurines of the naked goddess are found, for example, at the Heraion of Samos as well as that of Perachora. [...]

>A combined cult of Hera and Aphrodite is attested epigraphically at the Greek colony of Akrai in Sicily, where again the focus is on marriage rituals.

>The best known example of such an equivalence is given by the gold tablets from Pyrgi, where the Astarte of Phoenician text is named Uni (i.e., the Etruscan equivalent of Hera) in the Etruscan formulation. On Malta, it appears that Astarte was later equated with Juno Regina, a Latinized form of Hera.

>Another manifestation of the overlapping of the personalities of these deities would be that Hera, Aphrodite, and Astarte could all be styled as Hoplosmia: that is, the goddess could [...be] symbolized by the brandishing of a spear.

>At Argos, Elis, and Crotone, Hera may be described as Hoplosmia and her warlike character is also manifest at Samos. At Paestum too, archaeological and epigraphical evidence suggests that hera possessed a martial character.

>From her sanctuary in the urban center, an Archaic inscription addresses the goddess as one who can strengthen one's military prowess. In addition, several Archaic terracotta figurines [see image 4] dedicated there portray a goddess whose raised right arm once held a spear.

>With regard to Aphrodite, literary sources refer to the goddess as hoplosmia at Sparta, Corinth, Cythera, and Cyprus.

Ourania

Now for another epithet they share: Ourania. An ancient gemstone (see image 5) depicts Hera Ourania ("Heavenly Hera"), goddess of lions, seated atop a lion; with the two divine Dioscuri in her entourage, in front and behind her. This is hardly the first time we've seen the Dioscuri in the company of Hera. The Golden Ass mentions a play in which the two boys accompany the goddess to the Judgement of Paris (awkward, for Paris). I remember another occassion as well, though the details slip my mind. They were sons of Zeus who lived in Heaven, so by some accounts, that necessarily means that Hera had nursed them when they were little. They were also princes of Argos, so that makes sense.

The dedicator doing so for good luck indicates an association between Hera and luck (her crown here also subltly associates her with Tyche and Cybele-- not gonna get into that, their numistatic representations stress me out) and probably victory/skill in war. Much like how Aphrodite's Ourania epithet was invoked in Sparta as a part of her war-goddess persona.

Amazons

The Amazons were Hera's granddaughters, and insofar as she was associated with the mother goddess, they prayed to her as well as Ares and Artemis, particularly for seafaring aid, according to Diodorus.

The Amazons were also, on some occasions, related as Aphrodite's daughters, as with the Iliad D scholiast on Iliad 3.189:

>The Amazons are said to be the daughters of Ares and Aphrodite and raised along the Thermodon river in Scythia. They received the name Amazons because their right breasts {mazo-} are cut away since they get in the way when they shoot arrows. Melanippe and Hippolyte, the daughters of Ares, were the leaders of the Amazons’ army. They tried to bring Phrygia under their control because it had good grazing for horses and was rich in vines. They readied their whole army, came into the aforementioned region, and set up their camp along the Sangarios river. The kings of Phrygia at the time were Mygdon and Otreus, who marshalled their own armies and came to the same place as the Amazons to prevent them from advancing across their borders. Priam, the king of Troy, marched with them against the Amazons, being at that very moment in the full prime of life.

There is some evidence of Hera fearing for their wellbeing, such as when she encouraged the Amazons to fight against Heracles and presumably aided them as best she could. As shown (on image 2), Hera wielded an Amazonian shield, designating her as both a divine female warrior and a savage relative of the Amazons. This is of particular import especially as we previously established her as a goddess of shields, so she would be quite particular about those things. The shield itself, along with her spear, implicates her as a particular sort of skirmisher in combat. This aligns with her depiction in the Dionysiaca, where she is shown to use a shield made of clouds to perform similar enough functions.

Outside of the 2nd Argive temple of Hera was a metope featuring an Amazon (as seen on image 6).

Closing

Though Hera despised that Ares had betrayed her in the Trojan war (at the behest of Aphrodite), she directed none of that ire towards Aphrodite herself. Their relationship was cordial, even surrounded by the din of war. After all, Aphrodite wasn't the one who betrayed her. It was Ares' fault for agreeing to go along with it despite his oaths, not Aphrodite's for being clever in her own way.

Iliad 14.190ish

>Once Hera had dressed her body in this finery,

>she left the room and summoned Aphrodite.

>Some distance from the other gods, she said to her:

>“My dear child, will you agree to do

>what I ask of you, or will you refuse,

>because you’re angry with me in your heart,

>since I help Greeks and you aid the Trojans?”

>Zeus’s daughter Aphrodite answered her:

>“Hera,

>honoured goddess, daughter of great Kronos,

>say what’s on your mind. My heart tells me

>I should do what you ask, if I can,

>if it’s something that can be carried out.”

>fragment of Zeus' chariot; Hera bending over, driving a spear into the back of a giant who is trying to crawl away; beside Hera move two giants, one hurling a stone, the other hurling a spear; Athena wears a long robe with snake-fringed aegis...

Hera is a goddess of many complex and interwoven domains. While she is most famous today in her role as the goddess of marriage, this was hardly Hera's only role in antiquity, and it's a shame that people think her "weak" or say that her domain "can't work" within some kind of power system. I could focus on all of her domains, and I would love to, but Hypnos calls to me, so for now I'll specifically focus on her role as panhellenic war goddess.

(for those who wanna see Apollo fighting back to back with Hera in a fuller render of that vase)

I do not believe a digitally available image of this particular vase exists, though I do still have its vivid description. It seems very similar to image 7:

>On the left is Hera [facing] to [the] left, with long tresses, fillet, and long diapered chiton with diploidion, plunging a sword into the neck of a giant whom she has beaten down on one knee to [the] left; she holds him by the helmet with [her] left hand, and plants her right foot on his right leg. The giant (who may be Harpolycus) is bearded and wears a visored helmet, short embroidered chiton, cuirass, parameridia, and greaves; he is looking back.

Mother of War.

While both of Ares' parents are shown to dislike him in the Iliad, this is not for no reason, and it is not because of how he was born. It is specifically for his actions as a liar, backstabber, and two-timer who lacks loyalty throughout the war that they rebuke him so.

>Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar.
Among the gods who live on Mount Olympus,
you’re the one I hate the most. For you love war,
constant strife and battle. Your mother, Hera,
has an implacable, unyielding spirit.
It’s hard for even me to control how she reacts
to what I say. You’re suffering because of her,
through her conniving, that’s what I think.
But I’ll leave you in pain no longer.
You’re my child—your mother and I made you.

-Zeus speaks to Ares after he betrayed his mother and fought on behalf of the Trojans, Iliad 5.890

>But Pallas Athena laughed over him and spoke
to him in triumphant winged words: "You child;
not even this time did you consider how much stronger
I can claim I am than you, so you tried to match your
fury against mine. And so you are paying atonement
for your mother's furies, since she is angry and wishes
you ill, because you abandoned the Greeks,
and have given your aid to the insolent Trojans."

-Athena to Ares after losing a fight to her, Iliad 21.400ish

Despite that being the case, Ares' spirit is compared to that of Hera's, because she doesn't hate him for who he is or how he generally acts, she was angry specifically for how he betrayed her. She eagerly causes war and conflict, and her son is just like her in many ways, though the Iliad illustrates that Hera is fiercely loyal to her causes and won't back down for anything. If she is to swear an oath she disagrees with, she will reframe it to be the technical truth, rather than violating such an oath.

On many other occasions, Hera is shown to favor Ares, such as when he restrains Ixion for her, or they work together to prevent the birth of Apollo because Apollo's birth would bring shame/less love to Ares, in Callimachus' hymn to Delos:

>Hera murmured terrible against all child-bearing women that bare children to Zeus, but especially against Leto, for that she only was to bear to Zeus a son dearer even than Ares. Wherefore also she herself kept watch within the sky, angered in her heart greatly and beyond telling, and she prevented Leto who was holden in the pangs of child-birth. And she had two look-outs to keep watch upon the earth. The space of the continents did bold Ares watch, sitting armed on the high top of Thrakian Haimos...

Hera was also implicitly the mother of Enyo; Quintus Smyrnaeus, Fall of Troy 8.424:

>Over the strife shouted for glee Enyo, sister of Ares.

You could argue this is a symbolic relationship, rather than a literal one. To that, I point to Enyo being an epithet of Hera's, a common feature for related deities. As seen in Tzetzes’ On Lycophron 519:

>"Enyo" is an epithet of Hera, derived from the words "to accomplish" and "to kill", as she is a warlike Enyo and Anyo. In a mythical sense, this is true, but allegorically, she is the one who accomplishes everything, nourishes and completes; she is the same as the mingling and powerful air.

As many of us know, Hera also whooped Artemis' ass multiple times, was close friends with Athena the goddess of war, planned and plotted with her often, and was terrifying on the battlefield against Dionysus. Oh and she directly fought Heracles a good handful of times, though with the direct divine aid of Athena/Zeus, he was able to defeat her with cowardly arrows. Most notably, in the Pylean War, Hera sided with her brothers Poseidon and Hades (as well as Ares) against Heracles, trying to defend the Pylean people either because they were pious worshippers or, in Poseidon's case, their descendants. Ares was either in it for the love of the game or because Hera asked him to probably. Of all of these conflicts, her battle with Heracles at Pylos seems to be of the most antiquity, since it mirrors an actual Mycenaean battle against an unknown enemy which razed Pylos and left nothing but fired tablets behind.

Warlike Epithets

Hera had many names, and many of them involved killing people.

• Enyo. Accomplished Killer.
• Hoplosmia, Hera's most popular warlike epithet. It shares the same root word as hoplite, ὅπλον (hóplon), which means "armed/armored." In Hera's case, this indicated that she donned a massive goddamn shield and spear along with it. She was worshipped in this form in the eastern Peloponnese and much of southern Italy, with sanctuaries established there in her honor during Archaic Greek colonization. According to Rebecca Miller Ammerman (1991), this epithet could reasonably be ascribed, even if we haven't actually found inscriptions of it, to Hera in her cults at Argos, Samos, and various southern Italic cities, because of her overwhelmingly warlike character in those places. A visual representation is shown above. In the city of Crotone, it was said that Thetis had established the cult of Hera Hoplosmia there, after the death of Achilles, by growing an orchard-garden. A massive statue of the hero was left within the garden for mourning women to regularly go to to share in Thetis' grief for her soldier.
• Deias [bringer of destruction], mentioned by Lycophron in association with Hera and specifically called out as one of Hera's epithets by Tzetzes. He cites her Pylean war with Heracles for the reason.
• Tropaia, Of the [war] Trophies. She was gifted with trophies of war upon the success of men, and the epithet was thought to be a feminine inflection of Zeus' epithet Tropaiuchos (τροπαιοῦχος, "Guardian of Trophies"). This aligns with her cult in Argos, which stated that Menelaus donated a shield he had stolen from a dead Trojan to Hera after the war, and it remained in her Argive temple well into historical times.
• Alexandros, a Sicyonian epithet desginating Hera as a protector of mankind. It was reportedly imported to Sicyon from Argos by their king.
• Hippia, goddess of horses. Noted explicitly at Olympia (where she was worshipped alongside Poseidon Hippios before the chariot racing began) and implied in Samos and other places.
• Henioche, Charioteer, alongside Zeus the King in Lebedia, in the altar of Triphonius.
• Prodromia (She who Runs Forward) at Sicyon
• Dromaia (She who Runs) at Thera
• Pedion (Lady of the Open Field) in Sicily. This along with the last two epithets have been identified by scholars as being related to the prominent racing festivals held in Hera's honor all across Greece, such as those in Argos, Olympia, Plataea, and evidently Sicyon, Thera, and Sicily.
• Areia, in Paestum
• Ourania, on an ancient gemstone depicting her riding a lion alongside the Dioscuri, her horseriding stepsons.
• Gorgada, also Gorgo, "She Who Instills Fear [through her fierceness]", according to Tzetzes, sourced from Lycophron.
• Soteria, the savior
• The Eleutherion river ("water of Freedom") was used for purification rituals in Hera's Argive mystery cult. This might explain her connection to Eleutheria, who Ps.Hyginus' Fabulae considers Hera's daughter. Samos also had a festival called the Eleutheria, and it was held in honor of Love.
• probably others i can't remember atm, i'm writing this at 3am. I will probably end up making another post about this.

Cult info

This is taking longer than expected. So I'm gonna finish off with some rapid fire bullet points.

• Samians had a procession of soldiers and horses march to the temple of Hera during their yearly Heraea. Many dedications of horses and horseriders were found there in the temple. Similar practices occured for her in Argos, Aegina and Elis.
• In Argos, according to Irene Ringwood Arnold in the American Journal of Archaeology (1937) Hera was worshipped since Mycenaean times as a shield-goddess, with countless myths regarding the dedication of a shield to Hera's temple or in association with Hera for a variety of "confused" reasons, and even some Mycenaean depictions of a white-armed goddess being "called down" by a mortal woman praying before a shield. There was an Archaic inscription of all the names of the temples' record-keepers over the centuries, below which was a shield inserted in the stone. Shields were prizes given out at Hera's Argive games, where competitors could "win bronze" [shields] "from" the goddess. Men who raced in honor of Hera at Argos had to wear very restrictive armor which inhibited the bending of the knee, making it renowned for being a particularly difficult race. The practice was shared by the Plataeans. (This is just me making an assumption, but I wonder if Hera's prehistoric association with the shield and war in general is part of why Hephaestus and Ares were rendered as her sons -- these shields had to be forged by somebody on a regular basis, and they were used for a specific purpose: war). Prof. Arnold argued that Hera's martial aspect was not one that could be tossed aside or dismissed as a later development of the Classical period, but that it was her eldest and most primordial form in her original worship in Argos. That, at her core, she was a war goddess, and this is thoroughly reflected in the myths of her constant conflict and rivalry with Zeus. Especially in the Iliad, where she was not a particularly motherly goddess, or the epitome of everything a wife should be, but a prideful, vengeful wife who took what she wanted and held on to what belonged to her. She wanted violence. She needn't a reason.

Iliad book 4:

>“Most fearful son of Kronos, what are you saying? How can you wish to undermine my efforts, prevent them from achieving anything? What about the sweat which dripped from me as I worked so hard, wearing my horses out, gathering men to wipe out Priam and his children. Go ahead then. But all we other gods do not approve of what you’re doing."
“Dear wife, what sort of crimes have Priam or Priam’s children committed against you, that you should be so vehemently keen to destroy that well-built city Ilion? If you went through its gates or its huge walls, you’d gorge on Priam and his children, other Trojans, too, swallowing their flesh raw. That’s what you’d do to slake your anger. Do as you wish. We should not make this matter something you and I later squabble over, a source of major disagreements..."