The figure of Hera remains. At first sight she seems all wife, not maiden; she is the great typical bride, Hera Teleia, queen in Olympus by virtue of her marriage with Zeus; their Sacred Marriage is the prototype of all human wedlock. This is true for Homeric theology, but a moment’s reflection on the facts of local cultus and myth shows that this marriage was not from the beginning. The Hera who in the ancient Argonautic legend is queen in Thessaly and patron of the hero Jason is of the old matriarchal type; it is she, Pelasgian Hera, not Zeus, who is really dominant; in fact Zeus is practically non-existent. In Olympia, where Zeus in historical days ruled if anywhere supreme, the ancient Heraion where Hera was worshipped alone long predates the temple of Zeus. At Argos the early votive terra-cottas[815] are of a woman goddess, and the very name of the sanctuary, the Heraion, marks her supremacy. At Samos, at the curious festival of the _Tonea_[816], it is the image of a woman goddess that is carried out of the town and bound among the bushes, and Strabo[817] tells us that in ancient days Samos was called Parthenia, the island of the Maiden. At Stymphalus, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias[818] says that Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames: while yet a girl she was called Child, married to Zeus she was called Complete or Full-Grown (τελεία), separated from Zeus and returned to Stymphalus she was called Chera (Widow). Long before her connection with Zeus, the matriarchal goddess may well have reflected the three stages of a woman’s life; Teleia, full-grown, does not necessarily imply patriarchal marriage. Homer himself was dimly haunted by the memory of days when Hera was no wife, but Mistress in her own right. Otherwise, unless the poet was the lowest of low comedians, what means her ceaseless turbulence and the unending unseemly strife between the Father of Gods and Men and the woman he cannot even beat into submission? What her urgent insistent tyranny over Herakles whom Zeus loves yet cannot protect? Is the tyrannous mistress really made by the Greek housewife even of Homeric days in her own image? The answer is clear: Hera has been forcibly married, but she is never really wife, and a wife’s submission she leaves to the shadowy double of Zeus, who echoed his nature and (significant fact) took his name, she who was the real Achaean patriarchal double—Dione[819]. [Illustration: FIG. 90.] [Illustration: FIG. 91.]