Hour 1 2025.09.03 | “The Ancient Greek Hero” hour by hour
Review Hour 0 Text A
|1 Anger [mēnis], goddess, sing it, of Achilles son of Peleus – |2 disastrous [oulomenē] anger that made countless pains[algea] for the Achaeans, |3 and many steadfast lives [psūkhai] it drove down to Hādēs, |4 heroes’ lives, but their bodies [10] it made prizes for dogs |5 and for all birds, and the Will of Zeus was reaching its fulfillment [telos] – |6 sing starting from the point where the two – I now see it – first had a falling out, engaging in strife [eris], |7 I mean, [Agamemnon] the son of Atreus, lord of men, and radiant Achilles. |8 So, which one of the gods was it who impelled the two to fight with each other in strife [eris]? |9 It was [Apollo] the son of Leto and of Zeus. For he [= Apollo], infuriated at the king [= Agamemnon], |10 caused an evil disease to arise throughout the mass of warriors, and the people were getting destroyed.
Iliad I 1-10
Review Hour 3 Text A
|188 Thus he [= Agamemnon] spoke. And the son of Peleus [= Achilles] felt grief [akhos], and the heart |189 within his shaggy chest was divided |190 whether to draw the sharp sword at his thigh |191 and make the others get up and scatter while he kills the son of Atreus [= Agamemnon], |192 or whether to check his anger [kholos] and restrain his heart [thūmos].
Iliad I 188-192
Review of “Finding a cure for the anger of Hera.”
§2. I start with a passage in Rhapsody 18 of the Homeric Iliad, verses 107–126. The hero Achilles is speaking here, angrily speaking, and I follow the careful analysis of his angry words by Thomas R. Walsh in his book about anger in Homeric poetry (2005:218). As Walsh shows, these verses are a masterpiece of poetic self-expression by Achilles, where the hero rivals in his poetic mastery the great Homer himself, that ultimate culture hero credited with the composition of that ultimate poetic creation about anger, the Iliad(Walsh is following here the insights of Richard Martin 1989:223 about the Homeric representation of Achilles as a master poet in his own right). I now quote the thirteen most relevant verses in the cited passage, verses 107–119, where we see the primary hero of the Iliadin the act of expressing anger at his own anger by cursing it, putting a curse on it:
So may strife [eris], leaving the gods, leaving mortals, go to perdition,
and so may anger [kholos] as well, the kind of anger that pushes even a sound-thinking man into harshness,
the kind of anger that is much sweeter to the taste than honey as it pours down
in the breasts of men, the kind of anger that billows out like smoke from a fire
—that is what happened to me now, angered [verb of kholos] as I have been by the king of men, Agamemnon.
Those things, though… They are in the past. Done. I should let go of them, full of sorrow though I am.
I will overcome that spirit of mine in my breast. I just have to.
And now I will go off, chasing after the one who destroyed that near-and-dear head-to-be-hugged, I will catch up with that one,
I mean, Hector. And then I will be ready to accept the fate-of-death [kēr], whenever it will be—I now see it—
that Zeus wishes to make happen, together with the other immortal gods.
I say this because not even the might of Herakles could escape his own fate-of-death [kēr].
Even if he was most near-and-dear to Zeus, son of Kronos, the lord.
Still, fate [moira] overcame him, and so too did the painful anger [kholos] of Hera.
Iliad 18.107–119
§3. In the next three paragraphs, I interpret these verses as the hero’s own poetry about anger, inside a poem that is all about anger.
§3A. So, the anger of Hera caused the death of Herakles. Achilles himself, main hero of the Homeric Iliad, says it here. And he says it at the very moment when he decides, once and for all, to accept his own death. Achilles was talking about such an impending decision already at verses 410–416 in Rhapsody 9, but he finally gets to decide only now, in Rhapsody 18. This death of his, he has just been told, will be his fate. His death will be his fated death if he chooses to fight and kill Hector in revenge for that hero’s killing of Patroklos. And his own death, Achilles says, is fated, inevitable, just as the death of Herakles was fated, inevitable. That death, Achilles goes on to say outright, was caused by anger—by the anger of Hera. But his own death, Achilles is also saying now, will have been likewise caused by anger—by his own anger. And he bitterly curses this anger of his.
§3B. But this anger that Achilles is now bitterly cursing, this accursed anger, had once upon a time felt sweet to the taste—back when the hero first felt it in Rhapsody 1. That is what he is now saying in Rhapsody 18. This anger had once felt deliciously sweet, to be savored. But this accursed anger, the hero now admits with the deepest regret, had not really ever been sweet. It was always bitter, bitter all along, and it will have to be cured in the fullness of time. But not yet. Before any cure, this anger will be the fuel that drives Achilles in his quest to kill Hector. He must first kill Hector. And this accursed anger that now drives Achilles, which got started when he got angry at Agamemnon in Rhapsody 1 and which now billows out like the smoke of some raging fire in Rhapsody 18 as he sets out to kill Hector, is modeled on the kholos or ‘anger’ of Hera, which had caused the death of Herakles. The hero of the Iliad, in his own words, models his own future death on the kind of anger that caused the death of Herakles, and that anger was the anger of Hera.
§3C. I say “a kind of anger” here, not “the anger.” That is because Achilles in Rhapsody 18 of the Iliad is un-stating and thus un-thinking one kind of anger, mēnis, which he has experienced ever since Rhapsody 1 but which is now behind him, while he is restating and thus rethinking another kind of anger, kholos, which started for him in Rhapsody 1 and will continue for him beyond Rhapsody 18 all the way into Rhapsody 24. That is where the second kind of anger will finally stop. The hero’s first kind of anger, mēnis, had been directed against his fellow warriors, led by Agamemnon, over-king of the Achaeans. And so too with his second kind of anger, kholos: it had been originally directed at Agamemnon and the Achaeans, back in Rhapsody 1, but now, in Rhapsody 18, it has been redirected. Achilles is now angry only at the Trojans, led by Hector.
§4. Throughout my interpretation of Iliad 18.107–119 in the previous three paragraphs, I have been speaking about the “kinds of anger” experienced by Achilles, instead of saying simply “the anger of Achilles.” That is because there is no single all-encompassing word for “anger’ in Homeric poetry—any more than there is any single word for “anger” in the English language. In English, we may say “wrath” or “rage” or “fury” as well as “anger,” and they are all synonyms, as we call them. But of course they are only partial synonyms, since each one of these words has its own special way of being used. Similarly with Homeric words that we translate into English as ‘anger’ or the like: they too are synonyms, yes, but they too are only partial synonyms, as I point out in my Foreword (p. ix) to the book of Thomas Walsh on Homeric anger (2005). What is dissimilar, however, about such Homeric words that we translate as ‘anger’ or the like is that they, unlike the English words we use to translate them, belong to a system of poetry—what can best be described as a formulaic system. And this system that is Homeric poetry integrates the different uses of the different Greek words for “anger” into a unified poetics of heroic anger. That is the fundamental insight of Walsh’s book on anger in Homeric poetry (2005), concentrating on the Greek words kholos and kotos while building on the earlier findings of Leonard Muellner, whose own book on Homeric anger (1996) concentrates on the Greek word mēnis. In an abbreviated Homeric commentary (Nagy 2022), I summarize as follows, with specific reference to Iliad 1.74–83:
The words spoken by Kalkhas the seer at Iliad 1.74–83 indicate three different kinds of anger: mēnis at verse 75, kholos at verse 81, and kotos at verse 82. In the case of mēnis, it is a kind of “cosmic sanction”: I cite the definitive work of Muellner 1996, especially chapter 1. As for kholos, it is a kind of explosive anger that is generally instantaneous, as opposed to kotos, which is an anger that is timed to go off only in the fullness of time, when the course of events in the narration has come to fulfillment, as expressed at verse 82 by way of the verb teleîn ‘come to fulfillment’. On kotos in particular and on kholos in general, I cite Walsh 2005, especially chapter 1, where he analyzes the wording of the seer at verses 74–83 as a kind of “folk definition” for all three of the different kinds of anger mentioned in this passage.
§5. Looking back at this summary, I now think I may have overstated my view when I describe kholos as a kind of “explosive” anger that is “generally instantaneous.” While I still think that this kind of anger, when it manifests itself, is pictured as a most powerful explosion, I must now add that the explosiveness, once it is there, will always be there, unseen, just waiting to happen.
§6. In the Homeric Iliad, the kholos of Achilles has always been there, from the very beginning, in Rhapsody 1, where the hero “blew up” at Agamemnon, all the way toward the end, in Rhapsody 24, where Achilles is still at it, brutally mutilating the corpse of Hector. But now, at the very end, the brutality will stop because the anger will stop. And the stopping of this anger of Achilles can be seen as a cure for the anger, just as the anger of the goddess Hera can be stopped only if it too can be cured. That is why it is essential that Achilles, in the course of performing his own poem of anger in Rhapsody 18, links his own kholos to the kholos of Hera herself.
§7. We know how the kholos or ‘anger’ of Achilles is stopped, cured, in the Iliad. The hero’s acceptance of his own impending death, fated for him once he has killed Hector, leads him to let go of his anger at the end of Rhapsody 24—once his emotions connect with the emotions of Priam, father of Hector, who sorrowfully accepts the death of his own son. Once the anger of Achilles stops, so too does his bestial behavior come to an end. He stops his vengeful attempts at mutilating the corpse of Hector, and his humanity as a hero is ultimately restored, as I argued in The Best of the Achaeans (Nagy 1979/1999 7§§22–23 = pp. 135–137).
From an online essay by GN:
https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/about-greek-goddesses-as-mothers-or-would-be-mothers/
What follows is taken from near the beginning of that essay, Part I§2, followed by most of Part II, starting near the beginning of II§3…
(The Endnotes below refer to an extensive Bibliography located at the end of this essay. Merely “for your information”—in other words, merely extra reading, for those who are interested.)
I§2. … [T]the status of the goddess Hera as a biological mother in historical times is amply attested. I can even add that our first impression of Hera is that she seems to be, at least on the surface, a Mother Goddess. We could easily assume such a primary role for this goddess, since she is so well-known, even in popular culture nowadays, as the legitimate wife of the god Zeus, whose own role as a divine father is all-too-well known, for various reasons. And, as we know from the Hesiodic Theogony, verse 922, Hera and Zeus even produce three divine children together, whose names are Hēbē, Arēs, and Eileithuia. But I raise a question, right away, about easy assumptions: if Hera is primarily a Mother Goddess, then what can we say about the distinctly negative aspects of her motherhood, which are amply attested, as we will see, in the Theogony? Unexpectedly, perhaps, we are now suddenly faced with a major difficulty, since there exist two different mythological traditions, both well-attested not only in the Theogony but elsewhere as well, about the mothering role of Hera. In some cases, as we will see, she is a real mother, while in other cases she is only a would-be mother. And her would-be children turn out to be, well, difficult children. To put it another way, there are negative as well as positive aspects of Hera in myths about her motherhood and would-be motherhood.
I§3. I focus first on the negative aspects. The first relevant text I will consider is the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, verses 300–355, where we will read about a particularly difficult child of Hera. The story begins on a note of anger. The goddess Hera is nursing an anger. She was angry, very angry, at her husband, the god Zeus—who was also her divine brother—for his fathering, without her female participation, the goddess Athena herself. But how was it that Zeus fathered Athena without impregnating his own divine wife? The answer comes from a myth we find in a second relevant text for us to consider, verses 886–900 and 921–926 in the Hesiodic Theogony. We read there that Hera was not the first of the divine wives of Zeus but the very latest—and last, since there will be no wives for Zeus after Hera, as we read at verse 921. And, yes, Zeus did impregnate his wife, but that wife was not the latest wife. No, there were other wives, and I have in mind here the very first wife of Zeus, not the latest. We read about this first wife in the Theogony, where we learn that Zeus had chosen her as his queen when he first became king of all the Olympian deities (886), and her name was Mētis. She was, as her name signals, ‘Intelligence’ personified. And, yes, this goddess Mētis was made pregnant by Zeus. But now things get complicated. According to the retelling of the myth about this divine pregnancy in the Hesiodic Theogony, the embryo that ultimately became Athena could have been male from the start of conception (888), and so Zeus wanted to prevent the birth of a divine male successor as Olympian king—a new king who would overthrow him just as he had overthrown his own pre‑Olympian father (891–898). So, in an act of prevention, he persuaded his pregnant wife to let him swallow her (890/899). And, just like that, it was therefore he who gave birth to the child he had in concert with the goddess Mētis, but he gave birth not from his wife’s uterus, which was now inside him, but from his own head (924). Thus the birth-giving comes from the body of Zeus, which is outside the body of his wife, who is now inside his body. And this act of preventing a male child who could overthrow Zeus as Olympian king was in line with advice given to Zeus by Mother Earth herself, Gaia (900), in concert with the Sky Father, Ouranos (891–892).
I§4. That said, I must now quickly turn back to the first relevant text, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, verses 300–355. There we had left off at the point in the story, at verses 307–309, where Hera was angry at her husband Zeus for fathering, without her female participation, the goddess Athena herself. But I should not really be saying that Hera was angry at Zeus for his “fathering” of Athena, since the Greek wording says, quite starkly, that the father produced the daughter ἐν κορυφῇ ‘in his head’ (309). In other words, Zeus produced Athena from his head, and this form of reproduction was an act of stylized motherhood, not biological fatherhood, since Zeus actually gave birth to Athena, even if the birth came from the father’s head and not directly from the mother’s uterus. Thus I am now ready to say that the father’s act of giving birth here was a would-be birth, and that the father was acting in the role of a would-be mother.
I§5. But what about the anger of Hera? In her anger at Zeus for bypassing her in the act of giving birth, Hera now went ahead and contrived a way to conceive, without Zeus, a serpentine monster named Typhon, to whom she then gives birth at verse 307 of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. The whole process of reproduction here happens, it would seem, by way of XX cells, so to speak, without the active participation of XY cells. This kind of birth may be described, somewhat misleadingly, as parthenogenesis, that is, where a ‘virgin’ mother conceives and gives birth all by herself, without any need for male participation by way of her having to get inseminated. As we will see, however, a mother in ancient Greek mythmaking does not need to be a ‘virgin’, in our sense of the word, just because she wants to go it alone, as it were, and, further, there are also other factors involved in myths about giving birth without male participation. One such factor, as we will see, is anger. In the myth about Hera and the Typhon, for example, the anger of the goddess is the driving force behind her birth-giving, and the relevant word is kholos at verses 307 and 309 of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (via the denominative verbs χολωσαμένη and χολώσατο respectively). I will circle back to this theme of anger in Part II§19.
I§6. To be contrasted with the myth about Hera and Typhon in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo is a different myth in the Hesiodic Theogony.[1] According to this different myth, Hera is only a would-be mother of the serpentine Typhon—and even this case of would-be motherhood, as we are about to see, is actually one step removed. We start by reading, at verses 821–822 of the Theogony, how Mother Earth, the immortal Gaia/Gē, was inseminated by the immortal Tartaros, and how she thus conceived and gave birth to Typhon, whose alternative name is Typhoeus. The contextual evidence makes it clear that the names Typhon at verse 306 and Typhoeus at verse 821 refer to the same son.[2] That said, I will continue to refer to this serpentine monster simply as Typhon. This son is then described at verse 825 by way of the words ophis and drakōn, both of which mean ‘serpent’. Here we are faced with a question: if Mother Earth and not Hera gave birth to Typhon in this version of the myth, then is there a role here for Hera as a would-be mother? The answer, as we will now see, has to do with a most basic aspect of motherhood. As we will see from here on, the goddess Hera is intimately linked with the motherly act of breast-feeding.
I§7. Although Hera does not conceive or give birth to Typhon in the Hesiodic Theogony, she nevertheless gets involved in the narrative. And the involvement is motherly: as we will now see, she nurtured the progeny of this proto‑serpent, and the nurturing seems to have taken the form of breast-feeding. The progeny in this case was the Hydra of Lerna, who was actually the daughter of the serpentine Typhon, as we learn at verses 306 and 304 respectively, where we also learn that both parents of the Lernaean Hydra were serpentine: not only did she have a serpent father, Typhon, but she also had a serpent mother, Ekhidna, whose name corresponds to the common noun ekhidna, meaning ‘viper’ in Greek. As we read at verses 313–315, the goddess Hera actually nurtured the serpentine Hydra of Lerna—and the word that I translate as ‘nurture’ here is trephein at verse 314 (θρέψε). As I will show in Part II, the word trephein in this and related Hesiodic contexts can be translated specifically as ‘breast-feed’, not just generally as ‘nurture’. What I am saying, then, is that Hera in her negative role as Mother Goddess will not only give birth to serpents, as in the case of Typhon, but she will even breast-feed serpents, as in the case of the Hydra, daughter of Typhon. And there is even more to learn about Hera’s connectivity with the breast-feeding of serpents. Circling back to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, verses 300–355, where we are told that the monstrous serpent Typhon was biologically produced by Hera in her role as a soloist progenitrix (305–307), we also learn that Hera, after having given birth to Typhon, handed him over to the serpentine ‘She‑Dragon’ of Delphi—my translation ‘She‑Dragon’ here approximates her Greek name Drakaina (300), derived from the noun drakaina, a feminine by-form of the masculine noun drakōn, which means, more basically, ‘snake’. Once again, we see what is by now a most familiar theme: this she‑dragon is mandated by Hera to nurture Typhon—and the word that I translate as ‘nurture’ here is once again trephein (305: ἔτρεφεν), which I once again interpret more specifically here as ‘breast-feed’.
I§8. So far, we have seen only negative aspects of myths about the goddess Hera in her role as a mother who gives birth to her own children or in her role as a would-be mother who nurtures and even breast-feeds progeny not born from her own uterus. But that is only because, so far, we have seen the role of Hera as mother or would-be mother only in connection with children or would-be children who are monstrous. But Hera is also linked with nurturing that is positive.
I§9. In what follows, Part II, I turn to the basic idea that Hera, in her role as would-be mother, can be represented in myth as nurturing her would-be children in a positive way—not only in a negative way, which is all that we have seen so far. But who are such would-be children who are to be nurtured in a positive way? In the case of Hera, as we will now see, the prime example of such a would-be child of this goddess is the hero Herakles.
Part II. Hera as a would-be mother of the hero Herakles
II§1. In the “universal history” of Diodorus of Sicily, who lived in the first century BCE, we find a striking detail in the course of reading his narration of a myth about the death of the hero Herakles, who was persecuted all his life by the goddess Hera—only to be brought back to life by the same goddess, acting together with her consort, the god Zeus. The detail is this: the immortalization or “apotheosis” of Herakles through the agency of Hera paired with Zeus is formalized in a most remarkable moment where Hera, so says Diodorus (4.39.2), takes Herakles between her legs and goes through the motions of giving birth to the hero—which is for Herakles not just a birth but a rebirth. In what follows, I will show more details, but for now I simply highlight the most basic idea, as expressed in the myth as retold by Diodorus, and this idea is the hero’s rebirth from Hera. And we can actually see, in the traditions of ancient Etruscan visual art, a further example of this idea. I have just shown this example above, as the featured image for Part II of this essay.[3] The original image, as I say in the caption I write underneath the image, graces the other side of a hand-held mirror unearthed in ancient Etruria, and it pictures a scene derived from ancient Greek myth, mediated by Etruscan reception of this myth. Pictured is the goddess Hera showing her benevolence toward the hero Herakles, breast-feeding him as if he were a newborn child. The goddess, who is Hera in the Greek language, is named Uni in the Etruscan language, and her Etruscan name is the equivalent of her Roman counterpart, the goddess named Juno, Iūnō in Latin. As for Herakles, his Etruscan name is Hercle, equivalent of his own Roman counterpart, the hero named Herculēs, pronounced exactly that way in Latin. Presiding over this scene of benevolence in the picture is the divine husband of Uni, who is named Tini/Tinia in the Etruscan language, and he is seen here holding up a tablet that shows viewers the written names of Hercle and Uni. His own name Tini/Tinia is the Etruscan equivalent of the god’s Roman counterpart, who is the god named Jupiter, Iūppiter in Latin. Jupiter is of course Zeus himself in the Greek language. The benevolent stance of the god Tini/Tinia in this picture, as he presides over the breast-feeding of Hercle by the goddess Uni, conveys an ancient Greek idea of absolute benevolence on the part of both Hera and Zeus together toward the hero Herakles.
II§1a. But why would Hera/Uni breast-feed the adult Herakles/Hercle as if he were a newborn child? That is, why would Hera bestow on Herakles such a gift, performing such a benevolent gesture? The answer, as we will see, has to do with a central myth about Herakles—about his death and subsequent immortalization. According to that myth, the death of Herakles frees him from a dysfunctional world of myth, so that he may now be reborn, entering a functional world of ritual. And the agent of rebirth, as we will see, is the goddess Hera herself.[4]
II§1b. My question, as I tried to answer it in the previous paragraph, now needs to be followed up in this next paragraph here with a further question: what do I mean when I speak of a world of ritual that supersedes a world of myth? For Herakles, I argue, such a world of ritual becomes a reality in a special form of hero cult, and he becomes immortalized as a special cult hero. This argument was first formulated in a book originally published in 1979, titled The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry: as I argued there, the antagonism that existed between the goddess Hera and the hero Herakles in the world of myth gave way to a nurturing “symbiosis” for the two of them in the world of ritual.[5]
II§2. In the book I just cited, I analyzed the interconnectedness of myth with ritual not only in the special case of Herakles, who was worshipped in ancient Greece both as a hero and as a god, but also in the general case of what I call cult heroes who were worshipped in rituals that differed from the higher-status rituals reserved for the worship of gods. Then, many years later, I examined in far more detail the special case of Herakles in my book The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.[6]
II§2a. In that second book, I undertook an in-depth analysis of the meaning of the myths we read about the death of Herakles. And, at the core of all the details I analyzed in those myths, I found what turns out to be a most basic idea, which is, that Herakles was a mortal who was immortalized after his most painful death, and that this immortalization, which transformed him into a new god, happened on Mount Olympus and was actively arranged by the gods and goddesses who lived in that heavenly place.
II2b. On the basis of further arguments presented in the book I have cited in the previous paragraph, I have more to say here about the actual term hero cult. I use this term as a short-hand way of referring to the ancient Greek practice of worshipping heroes in local communities. I argue that such a practice was a stylized form of ancestor worship. Such worship, I can say in general, becomes complicated as it evolves in complex societies—and the various different social structures of ancient Greek civilization, as known to historians, are a shining example of such complexity. The very idea of worshipping your ancestors becomes complicated in such complex societies—where, for example, most non-aristocrats could no longer trace their ancestors further back than, say, great-grandparents or even grandparents, whereas, by contrast, an aristocrat like Leonidas, king of Sparta, who died most valiantly at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE, could trace his ancestry back to Herakles himself—a hero who lived, supposedly, twenty generations before the life and times of this king (so says the ancient historian Herodotus 7.204.1). The vast gap of time that separates heroes in the mythologized world of an Age of Heroes from the real world of Greek populations who worshipped them in, say, the fifth century BCE resulted in a pronounced differentiation of hero cult as a specialized version of what in ordinary life could be considered a ritualized veneration of immediate ancestors.
III§2c. That said, I must now add that the case of Herakles as a cult hero was exceptional in ancient Greek history when compared with all other attested cases where heroes were worshipped. And there is a historical basis for such exceptionalism, since the ancient myths about this particular hero were so exceptionally widespread in the Greek-speaking world. But there is also a mythological basis, since Herakles was practically the only mortal in Greek myths who was fathered by the king of the Olympians, the god Zeus himself, though his mother was mortal, thereby rendering him mortal as well. Thus Herakles was uniquely qualified to become the protagonist of a unique myth where a hero is restored from death on Mount Olympus by the Olympians themselves—and where the hero thus becomes a new god who is fit to be worshipped as a god, not just as a hero.
II§3. With this background now in place, I can turn back to the relevant narrative of Diodorus of Sicily about the apotheosis of Herakles on Mount Olympus, which is described as a rebirth. As I already noted in general, we find in this narrative a stylized but nevertheless quite explicit reference to such a rebirth. But now I go into details. Here is a paraphrase of the relevant narrative by Diodorus (4.39.2–3), as I summarize this narrative in Hour 1 of The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours:
Herakles dies on the heights of Mount Oeta, blasted away by a thunderbolt of Zeus, but then he regains consciousness and finds himself on the heights of Mount Olympus, in the company of the gods. He has become immortalized, adopted by the Olympian theoi ‘gods’ as one of their own. He has experienced apotheosis. Hera now changes identities: no longer a stepmother to Herakles, she becomes his virtual mother. The procedure is described in some detail by Diodorus, and I translate literally (4.39.2): ‘Hera got into her bed and drew Herakles close to her body; then she ejected him through her clothes to the ground, re‑enacting [= making mīmēsis of] genuine birth’ (τὴν δὲ τέκνωσιν γενέσθαι φασὶ τοιαύτην· τὴν Ἥραν ἀναβᾶσαν ἐπὶ κλίνην καὶ τὸν Ἡρακλέα προσλαβομένην πρὸς τὸ σῶμα διὰ τῶνἐνδυμάτων ἀφεῖναι πρὸς τὴν γῆν, μιμουμένην τὴν ἀληθινὴν γένεσιν).[7]
II§4. I follow up with further analysis:[8]
Birth by Hera is the hero’s rebirth, a birth into immortality. But the rebirth can only happen after death. The hero can be immortalized, but the fundamental painful fact remains: the hero is not by nature immortal. I need to emphasize that the name Hēraklês/Hērakléēs, which means ‘he who has the glory [kleos] of Hera’, marks both the medium and the message of the hero. But when we first consider the meaning of the name of Herakles, our first impression is that this name is illogical: it seems to us strange that Herakles should be named after Hera—that his poetic glory or kleos should depend on Hera. After all, Herakles is persecuted by Hera throughout his heroic life on Earth. And yet, without the disequilibrium brought about by the persecution of Hera, Herakles would never have achieved the equilibrium of immortality and the kleos or ‘glory’ that makes his achievements live forever in song.
II§5. In terms of my analysis here, what I call ‘song’ is anchored in the functional world of ritual, in the world of hero cult. We see equilibrium here. The disequilibrium, by contrast, becomes visible only in the world of myth, retold in the ritualized context of ‘song’.
II§6. The goddess Hera presides over the equilibrium of seasonality, and that is what her name actually means, ‘seasonality’. As I have argued for over fifty years by now, the etymology of both names, Hḗrā and Hēraklês/Hērakléēs, as also of the noun hḗrōs ‘hero’, can be explained in terms of Indo‑European linguistics.[9]Etymologically, the name of the goddess, Hḗrā, accentuates her benevolent side, which is seasonality, as we see from the related noun hṓrā, which actually means ‘season, seasonality’.[10]
II§7. In her wide-ranging book on the goddess Hera, the etymological explanation that I offer here is accepted by Joan O’Brien, but her view of the positive and the negative aspects of the goddess differs from mine.[11] For O’Brien, the benevolence and the malevolence of Hera toward Herakles can be explained in terms of older and newer attitudes toward the goddess as she evolved through time. For me, on the other hand, as I already argued in The Best of the Achaeans, the malevolence is just as old as the benevolence, but such negative and positive aspects of the relationship between divinity and hero can be explained in terms of antagonism in myths about heroes and symbiosis in rituals that frame such myths in the context of hero cult.[12]
II§8. With regard to the positive as well as the negative aspects of the relationship between divinity and hero, I have compared in a separate work, in terms of Indo‑European linguistics, the death scene of the Greek hero Herakles with the death scene of the Indic hero Śiśupāla as narrated in the epic Mahābhārata (II 42.14–25):
In the case of Śiśupāla, his life-force is absorbed in a flash of light generated by the god Viṣṇu/Kṛṣṇa, and this flash, explicitly compared to lightning in the narrative, comes out of the hero’s body and goes inside the god’s body. Comparably in the case of Herakles, his life-force is absorbed in a flash of lightning generated by the god Zeus, and this flash goes inside the body of the goddess Hera. Such an entry is implicit in the ensuing stylized detail: as we have seen, Hera notionally gives birth to the hero, so that Herakles must have been inside Hera—at least, notionally so. Now the hero can be born, really reborn, from his new mother, Hera, who has thus given him a life that becomes eternal. Thus an antagonism between Hera and Herakles has led to an eventual symbiosis between divinity and hero.[13]
II§9. Once immortalized, Herakles becomes the devoted son of Hera, who gives birth to him, at least notionally, as we have read in Diodorus (4.39.2). We find another example of such symbiosis in the picture that I showed as the featured image for this essay.[14]
II§10. Having first considered the eventual positive side of the relationship between Hera and Herakles, I now turn to the negative side, as retold in earlier parts of the story. Tracking the various myths that tell about the antagonism between goddess and hero, I start with a most striking example. We read, in a retelling by Diodorus (4.9.6), that the goddess Athena had once upon a time persuaded a hesitant goddess Hera to breast-feed Herakles when he was still a baby; the hero’s mortal mother had abandoned him and exposed him to the elements, since she feared Hera. This symbiotic gesture, where Hera breast-feeds the infant Herakles, led to early antagonism, as we read further in Diodorus (4.9.6–7): while the breast-feeding was underway, the baby sucked too hard and bit the goddess on the breast, so that Hera tossed the baby aside, and Athena had to bring him back to his mortal mother. In further versions of the myth, it is added that Hera, when she abruptly pulled her breast away from the biting baby, spilled her milk into the sky, thus unwittingly creating the Milky Way (for example, “pseudo-Eratosthenes” Catasterismi 3.44 ed. Olivieri).
II§11. There is a comparable instance of antagonism in the Homeric Iliad, 5.392–394, where we read that the adult Herakles had once upon a time wounded Hera by shooting a poisoned arrow into her right breast, causing an incurable algos ‘pain’ (394).
II§12. That wounding happened in the past. But now, in the present time of the Homeric narrative in Iliad 5, the goddess Hera is getting ready to enter the scene of man-to-man combat in the Trojan War: first she outfits her divine chariot (719–732) and then she rides off from Olympus, driving her divine horses across the vast space separating sky from earth (768–769), finally arriving at the Plain of Troy (772–775). Joining Hera for the cosmic ride and standing side-by-side with her on the platform of this heavenly ‘chariot of fire’ (okhea phlogea, 745) is Athena, who has fully armed herself for combat in war (733–744). The mission for this divine chariot fighter Athena and for her divine chariot driver Hera is to stop the onslaught of the raging god of chaotic war, Arēs, who has intervened in the man-to-man combat by overtly fighting on the side of the Trojans. In the action that follows (verse 776 and thereafter), Athena as a goddess of organized warfare will stop Arēs by aiding her protégé, Diomedes the Achaean, who will now achieve his greatest success as a warrior: he gets to inflict a serious wound on Arēs, thus putting a temporary end to the chaotic war-god’s onslaught. The success extends further, since Diomedes will now go on to wound Aphrodite, who has been aiding her son, her own protégé, Aeneas the Trojan. I see here a parallel in the embedded narrative about the wounding of Hera by Herakles, as retold in Iliad 5, where it is Hera and not Aphrodite who gets wounded by a mortal hero.
II§13. The wounding of Hera by Herakles in myth, as narrated in Iliad 5.392–394, where we read that the adult Herakles had once upon a time wounded Hera by shooting a poisoned arrow into her right breast, causing an incurable algos ‘pain’ (394), motivates a special kind of anger that this goddess feels toward that hero. This anger is mixed into her milk, infected by the poisoned arrow that wounded her breast. The question is, can there be a cure in ritual for the incurable pain that this wound has caused in myth? And the answer to this question is already at hand when we consider the future reconciliation between Hera and Herakles in the context of the hero’s apotheosis on the heights of Olympus. The toxicity of the milk of Hera is cured in the benevolent scene of the hero’s apotheosis, where Hera breast-feeds the reborn Herakles as her new son.
II§14. In earlier parts of the story, however, we see a vicious circle of seemingly never-ending toxicity. I find it essential here to consider the chicken-and-egg reasoning in the myth about the nursing of the Lernaean Hydra by Hera at verse 315 of the Hesiodic Theogony: as we have seen in Part I §7, the goddess nursed the serpent because she was nursing her anger at Herakles—and the word for her anger there is kotos (by way of the denominative verb κοτέουσα) at verse 315. It is as if the breast-feeding of the Hydra by Hera had been caused by the poisoning of her milk when the hero shot her in the breast with his poisoned arrow, and yet the poison of the hero’s poisoned arrow originated, as we will see, from the Hydra she was nursing.
II§15. Relevant is an analysis, published in a separate essay, where I connected this myth about the breast-feeding of the serpentine Hydra by Hera with narratives about the anger displayed by this goddess against Trojans in general and against Herakles in particular. I now epitomize from that essay the connections between these two narratives.[15] In the case of the Trojans, as we read in Iliad 4.31–36, Hera was so angry at them that she desired their collective doom. And, in the case of Herakles, she had good reason to be angry at Herakles for shooting a poisoned arrow into her breast—angry enough to desire his doom as well. But, in this case, not only was the anger of the goddess eventually cured. Likewise cured was the wound caused by the poisoned arrow that was shot into her right breast by Herakles in that incident retold at verses 392–394 of Rhapsody 5 of the Iliad, even though we read there that Herakles thus caused an incurable algos ‘pain’, highlighted at verse 394. When we look beyond this part of the myth, we can see what is left unsaid in the Iliad: once Herakles is reborn, he is breast-fed by Hera, and I have highlighted in Part II here a most relevant image that pictures the breast-feeding. This benevolent gesture on the part of the goddess shows, as I also argued in the separate essay that I am epitomizing here, that the wound inflicted once upon a time by the arrow of Herakles, incurable in the heroic world of myth, has been cured in the post‑heroic world of ritual, where the pollutions retold in myth may be purged by way of re‑enacting myth in ritual.
II§16. But how are we to imagine the sequence of mythological events that extend from the wounding of the right breast of Hera all the way to the breast-feeding of Herakles by the goddess? To address this question, I make a start here by tracking other myths that tell of Hera in the act of breast-feeding:
II§16.1. As we have already seen, Hera breast-feeds a monstrous serpent, the Hydra of Lerna, in the Hesiodic Theogony313–314; this Hydra is the progeny of another monstrous serpent, the Ekhidna, named in Theogony 297 and 306. Further, Hera also breast-feeds the Lion of Nemea, another progeny of the Ekhidna, in Theogony 327–329.
II§16.2. But there is also another myth, not yet cited in this essay, where Hera breast-feeds Thetis, mother of Achilles, as we read in Iliad 24.59–60; Thetis in turn breast-feeds Achilles, as we read in Iliad 16.203. The relevance of this other myth will become evident in what follows.
II§17. The myth about the breast-feeding of the serpentine Hydra by Hera is I think connected with other myths that tell how Herakles, when he split open the body of the monster after killing it, made poisoned arrows by dipping the metallic tips into the gall that flowed from the gall bladder of the Hydra. The sources are Sophocles, Trachinian Women 569–577; Diodorus of Sicily 4.11.6; the Library of “Apollodorus” 2.5.2 p. 189 ed. Frazer; Pausanias 2.37.4.
II§18. In three of these sources (Sophocles, Diodorus, Pausanias), it is made explicit that any wound caused by the poisoned arrows of Herakles will be incurable. And here I return to the pain, described as incurable, of the wound caused by the arrow shot by Herakles into the right breast of Hera, narrated in Iliad 5.392–394. I ask myself: is the pain of this wound incurable because it was infected by the gall that flowed from the bladder of the Hydra—the gall that poisoned the tips of the arrows shot by Herakles? I find an answer to this question in a myth, as retold by Diodorus (4.36.4–5), that tells how Herakles killed a noxious Centaur named Nessos, who tried to rape his new wife, Deianeira. The hero shot the monster with one of his poisoned arrows—the tips of which, as we have seen, were smeared with the same gall that the hero had extracted from the gall bladder of the dead Hydra. But the poisoned arrow that killed Nessos also eventually killed Herakles himself, as we read in this same myth as retold by Diodorus, where it is revealed that the toxic substance that killed Herakles by mere contact with his skin was a mixture of olive oil, blood, semen from the Centaur, and, fourth, gall smeared on the tip of the poisoned arrow that had killed the Centaur.
II§19. In Greek, the word that I translate as ‘gall’ here is kholḗ. But another Greek word that can also mean ‘gall’ or ‘bile’ is khólos, the ordinary meaning of which is ‘anger’, as we see from the careful etymological and contextual analysis of these two words kholḗ and khólos in a book on Homeric anger by Thomas R. Walsh: thus, kholos as the anger of Hera could be visualized as yellow bile.[16] At I§5 above, we saw this same word kholos referring to the anger felt by Hera at verses 307 and 309 of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo in reaction to the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus.
II§20. I find it relevant to compare here two myths that I cited for the first time at II§16.2. According to those myths, Hera had breast-fed Thetis, mother of Achilles, as we read in Iliad 24.59–60, while Thetis in turn had breast-fed Achilles, as we read in Iliad 16.203. We see here a connection between the kholos or ‘anger’ of Hera, as mentioned at verses 307 and 309 of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and the kholos or ‘anger’ of Achilles, mentioned by Achilles himself in bitter words spoken by the hero at verses 107–119 in Rhapsody 18 of the Homeric Iliad: as Joan O’Brien has noted, the anger of Hera is transmitted to Achilles in the milk of his mother, since Hera had breast-fed Thetis just as Thetis had breast-fed Achilles.[17] To say it biologically, the toxic gall in the mother’s milk of Hera, infected by the poisoned arrow of Herakles, is transmitted by way of Thetis to Achilles.
II§21. In his own words, spoken at verses 200–209 of Rhapsody 16 in the Iliad, Achilles shows an awareness of the gall that infected the mother’s milk of Thetis. He is speaking here to his fellow warriors, the Myrmidons, admitting to them that they must surely be shocked by the savagery of his anger, which he calls kholos at verse 206. Achilles is already saying at verse 203 that he would not blame his comrades for thinking that he must have been breast-fed by Thetis not on mother’s milk but on anger, and here too at verse 203 he uses the word kholos, just as he uses it later at verse 206—except that this time, at verse 203, kholos can refer directly to gall, real gall mixed in milk, not only to gall as a metaphor for anger. As Laura Slatkin has pointedly shown in her book about Thetis (2011), this goddess has her own anger, inherited from her by Achilles. And, as we now see, the hero’s own capacity for anger is transmitted through his mother’s toxic milk, which in turn is transmitted from the gall mixed into the mother’s milk of Hera. Achilles here is clearly aware of the anger that comes from Hera, as we read at verses 117–119 of Iliad 16, where he speaks of the malevolence shown by the goddess toward Herakles when that hero was alive. But he does not speak of the benevolence of this same goddess toward that same hero when Herakles is reborn after death. What galls Achilles, in any case, is that he too, like Herakles, must accept death as a cure for his own anger. By contrast, unlike Achilles, Herakles must accept death as a cure for the anger of Hera herself. Once that anger is cured, the mother’s milk of the goddess will no longer be toxic for the hero.
II§22. As I prepare to bring Part II to a close, I highlight a detail about the Lion of Nemea. This monster, like the Hydra of Lerna, is pictured as a nursling of Hera in the Hesiodic Theogony: at verse 328 we read how the goddess nurtured this monster—and the verb for ‘nurture’ here is once again trephein (θρέψασα). Like the Hydra, the Lion too has been nurtured by Hera to become a most dangerous threat to Herakles, but the hero kills the monster, as we read at verse 332, just as he kills that other most dangerous menace, the Hydra, as we read at verse 316.
II§23. Having made this point about the Nemean Lion, I am ready to conclude Part II by returning to the myth of the Lernaean Hydra, whose toxicity has been the most evident expression of the malevolent side of Hera. This goddess can stop nursing her anger against Herakles only after the redemptive moment when the gall of the Hydra ceases to invade her breast, so that the benevolence of her mother’s milk of divine kindness may flow into the body of the former antagonist who at long last is now accepted as her devoted son, the hero Herakles.
Hēraklēs and the idea of the hero
1§49. At the core of the narratives about Hēraklēs is the meaning of hērōs, ‘hero’, as a cognate of Hērā, the goddess of seasonality and equilibrium, and of hōrā, a noun that actually means ‘seasonality’ in the context of designating hero cult, as in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 265. [29] The decisive verse that I cite here from Homeric Hymn to Demeter will be quoted in Hour 8 Text C and analyzed in Hour 8§§20-21. The unseasonality of the hērōs in mortal life leads to the telos or ‘fulfillment’ of hōrā, ‘seasonality’, in immortal life, which is achieved in the setting of hero cult, as we will see in Hour 13§§11-22. Such a concept of telos as ‘fulfillment’ is also expressed by an adjectival derivative of telos, which is teleia, used as a cult epithet that conventionally describes the goddess Hērā. [30] That is, Hērā is the goddess of telos in the sense of ‘fulfillment’, as we will see in Hour 13§18.
1§50. Overall, the narratives about Hēraklēs fit neatly into a model of the hero as I outline it in a general article I have published on the topic of the epic hero. [31] I offer here {44|45} a shortened version of the outline that I develop there. In terms of that outline, there are three characteristics of the hero:
- The hero is unseasonal.
- The hero is extreme – positively (for example, ‘best’ in whatever category) or negatively (the negative aspect can be a function of the hero’s unseasonality).
- The hero is antagonistic toward the god who seems to be most like the hero; antagonism does not rule out an element of attraction – often a “fatal attraction” – which is played out in a variety of ways.
1§51. All three characteristics converge in the figure of the hero Hēraklēs:
- He is made unseasonal by Hērā.
- His unseasonality makes it possible for him to perform his extraordinary Labors. He also commits some deeds that are morally questionable: for example, he destroys the city of Iole and kills the brothers of this woman in order to capture her as his bride – even though he is already married to Deianeira (Diodorus of Sicily 4.37.5).
- He is antagonistic with Hērā throughout his lifespan, but he becomes reconciled with her through death: as we have seen, the hero becomes the virtual son of Hērā by being reborn from her. As the hero’s name makes clear, he owes his heroic identity to his kleos and, ultimately, to Hērā. A parallel is the antagonism of Juno, the Roman equivalent of Hērā, toward the hero Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid.
1§52. Before we go on, I must highlight the fact that the story of Hēraklēs includes the committing of deeds that are morally questionable. It is essential to keep in mind that whenever heroes commit deeds that violate moral codes, such deeds are not condoned by the heroic narrative. As we will see later, in Hours 6 7 8, 18, the pollution of a hero in myth is relevant to the worship of that hero in ritual.
Some audiovisual content for Hours 1 and 2:
Endnotes
[1] A valuable introduction to this myth is a book about Hera by Joan O’Brien (1993).
[2] West 1966:252.
[3] In the book AGHAP, pp. 87 and 91–92, I showed two examples. The example I have chosen for the featured image here in Part II is a close-up, as shown at p. 92 in that book, of the full image (shown at p. 91 there).
[4] This paragraph is epitomized from AGHAP pp. 87–88. The paragraphs that follow are further epitomized from AGHAP pp. 88–96.
[5] Nagy 1979/1999:302–303 = 18§2; Loraux 1990:44. From here on, I will be referring to this book in the footnotes simply as BA.
[6] H24H, “Introduction” and “Hour 1.”
[7] H24H 1§46.
[8] What follows is an epitome from H24H 1§§47–48.
[9] Nagy 1972:51–52 / 770–771.
[10] For more on these etymologies: Nagy 1979/1999 [BA] 303 = 18§2 318–319; Davidson 1980:199; Nagy 1990a:140n27 = 5§7; Sinos 1980:14; Nagy 1990b:136; Nagy 2013 [H24H] 1§49.
[11] O’Brien 1993:116n9.
[12] Again I cite my argument in BA (Nagy 1979/1999) 302–303 = 18§2 and the summary by Loraux 1990:44.
[13] This analysis is epitomized from AGHAP p. 90.
[14] Further comments by Puhvel 1987:251.
[15] The separate essay from which I epitomize here is published in Classical Continuum, Nagy 2025.08.16. Epitomized from §§8–18 there are II§§15–21 here.
[16] Walsh 2005:217–225.
[17] These details are also noted by O’Brien 1993:93.
————-
[29] PH 140n27 = 5§7; GM 136. See also Davidson 1980 and 2013a:89-90.
[30] This cult epithet for Hērā, teleia, is attested for example in Aristophanes Women at the Thesmophoria 973.
[31] EH §§105-110.