Hera
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Queen of the Olympian gods is swallowed whole by her father at birth and then marries her brother Zeus, who turns himself into a cuckoo to seduce her. Hera, or Juno to the Romans, has her triumphs. She adds the eyes to the tail feathers of her sacred bird the peacock by plucking them from the hundred-eyed monster Argos. And in the Iliad she dons a magic bra given to her by Aphrodite to persuade Zeus to support the Greeks against the Trojans.
Her loyalty to the Greeks begins when Trojan prince Paris doesn't choose her as the most beautiful. She then devotes her life to persecuting him and his people. Perhaps a slight overreaction. But is Hera a monster or just mistreated by the undisputed worst husband of all time?
At a packed out solo show recorded at the Hay Festival Natalie puts the case for and against.
'Rockstar mythologist' Natalie Haynes is the best-selling author of 'Divine Might', 'Stone Blind', and 'A Thousand Ships' as well as a reformed comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greek and Rome.
Producer...Beth O'Dea
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.4 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for the goddess Heara. |
| 0:15.4 | So Heera is the queen of the Olympian gods. |
| 0:21.3 | She is sister to Hestia, to Demeter, to Hades, to Poseidon, and to Zeus. |
| 0:27.1 | They are all the offspring of Cronos and Ria, which means that Hera, like her other siblings, |
| 0:33.6 | except one, swallowed by her father as soon as she's been born. He is paranoid. Kronos is famously |
| 0:38.9 | paranoid that he'll be overthrown by his children, so he averts that by swallowing them whole. |
| 0:44.4 | Which works fine, I mean, I guess it depends who you are, until their youngest child, Zeus, |
| 0:50.5 | Ria is so sick of him swallowing her children by this point that she swaps Zeus out for a large stone, for the Onfellos, in fact, the stone which is the centre of the earth at Delphi. |
| 1:01.2 | And so Zeus manages to sneak away and grow up on Crete and he forces Cronos to regurgitate his older siblings, which is how Hera gets a chance to grow up, something which she apparently does, |
| 1:13.0 | away from her birth family. I don't think I blame her. If I'm absolutely honest with you, |
| 1:19.7 | I think you'd always just be worrying a bit what was going to happen next time your dad was hungry. |
| 1:26.6 | You'd be like, should I give him a biscuit? |
| 1:28.7 | I don't know. |
| 1:30.0 | So authors from Homer to Ovid call Hira the foster daughter of Tethys and Oceanus. |
| 1:35.8 | These are two watery titans who have loads of river god and sea nymph offspring. |
| 1:40.9 | So they definitely have room for a future queen of the gods. |
| 1:43.9 | You can see, as I say, |
| 1:45.3 | why she might have preferred foster parents to her birth parents. And she does really appreciate |
| 1:49.6 | them in Homer. She talks about how Tethys took her from Ria and raised her well. She goes to |
| 1:55.6 | visit her foster parents quite frequently. It seems they have a really affectionate relationship. |
| 2:00.2 | This only seems surprising when you realize what hero's relationships with almost everyone else are like, |
... |
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