Holmberg, 'Transformation of Hera: A Study of Ritual, Hero, and the Goddess in the "Iliad"', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9502
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9502-holmberg-transformation
@@@@95.2.4, O'Brien, Transformation of Hera
Joan V. O'Brien, The Transformation of Hera: A Study of
Ritual, Hero, and the Goddess in the "Iliad". Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1993. Pp. xvi, 235. $22.95. ISBN
0-8476-7808-3 (pb).
Reviewed by Ingrid E. Holmberg -- University of Victoria
This study of Hera is a welcome one indeed, as I can attest
from the personal experience of attempting to find material on
Hera beyond the purely etymological when I was writing my thesis.
O'B. relies upon a combination of archaeological, ritual and
literary evidence in her attempt to present a cohesive picture of
the changing nature and character of the goddess. Her three main
sources are the sites and myths associated with Hera at Samos and
Argos, and the Iliad; these provide a view of the goddess
as a complex mixture of Olympian sky goddess and chthonic deity
(4). Despite different rites and founding myths, O'B. sees the
Hera at Samos and Argos as essentially the same deity: both Samos
and Argos seem to have worshiped a trifunctional "Mycenaean Hera"
(171); cultic myths associated with both sites describe
priestesses with Argolic fathers and significant thefts (4, 55,
143-144, 169). O'B. concludes that "the rites at both places
apparently had antecedents in the Mycenaean Argolid where bo+piw
p_tnia _Hra was revered as the Argolid's ox goddess linked to ox,
bull, and heifer myths during its formative period" (170). A
primary aspect of this goddess which becomes prominent in the
Iliad is that she "had power over the life and death of
.. heroes, including Heracles 'he who wins fame from Hera'"
(171).
Chapters one through three focus on the evidence at and
relating to Samos. The archaeological evidence prior to the large
seventh century sanctuary dates back to the Bronze Age and
exhibits a strong Anatolian/Carian influence (4, 11-12). The
architectural remains (the cult houses and altar) seem to reflect
contemporaneous Greek structures, while the iconography of a
goddess accompanied by animals, the potnia theron, seems
to suggest an Asian fertility goddess (40-43, 45-50, 69-70). O'B.
connects the enlargement of the shrine in the seventh century
with the assimilation of the local Hera cult to the Panhellenic
Olympian religion (15). Significantly, no connection with Zeus is
documented before the seventh century (15, 39). O'B. argues that
the change in Hera's meaning from a fertility and protection
goddess pre-600 to the wife and sister of Zeus post-600 can be
seen in the switch from the aniconic xoana (about which we
only know from literature) as the cult representation of Hera to
iconic statuettes. The fourth-century Samian Inventory of the
Heraion describes a fascinating juxtaposition between the earlier
aniconic wooden image and the later iconic statue as "the
goddess" and "the goddess behind" (25, 30). The new statue
occupies the position of importance within the temple because it
represents "Hera's emerging Panhellenic role" as sister-wife of
Zeus (31).
O'B. turns to accounts of the Samian Tonaia and later the
Argolic Hekatombaia and Bouphonia in her attempts to disentangle
early cult praxis from later myths. In these rituals and their
meanings, O'B. again sees a change from an earlier of fertility
and protection to the marriage of Hera and Zeus (54-55, 74, 151).
I found myself extremely sceptical about these attempts to
document or explain early rituals for two reasons. The first is
that the description of the rites, which O'B. argues precede the
seventh century Olympian assimilation, are provided by much later
authors such as Athenaeus and Pausanias. Clearly both sets of
cultic myths focus on binding the goddess (or her surrogate
priestess) to a tree (55-56, 143-144) and various scenarios
involving oxen in Argos, but whether these are directly related
to seasonal fertility in the sense which O'B. intends seems
dubious to me. Second, the goddess of fertility must be bound to
her tree to ensure her presence (55-56, 144). Why? Does she not
wish to perform her role? Is she not beneficent? The question of
Hera's beneficence arises again in her relationship to heroes.
The discussion of Hera in the Argolid in chapter five
parallels chapter three on Samos and should properly precede the
analysis of the Iliad in chapter four. O'B. admits that
the interpretation of Hera in Mycenaean Argolid is "hardest to
weigh and fraught with problems of interpretation" (6). As in
Samos, the evidence (written in this case) shows that a
potnia called Hera already existed in the Mycenaean
period, "or at least had cultic continuity with the Hera of the
Archaic period" (120). The potnia seems to have comprised
three aspects--trees, war, and family (126, 127) which evolved in
Greek tradition into several goddesses (58, 130-131). O'B.
identifies the goddess of the column who is associated with the
tree as the "Mycenaean Hera" (127), the most direct predecessor
of the later Hera. O'B. makes the provocative suggestion that, if
Hera was understood as part of a trifunctional goddess, there is
"the very real possibility that early regional versions of the
Judgment of Paris would have featured Paris receiving his three
choices from the one Argolic potnia, Hera" (162). O'B.
presumes here that the Argolic potnia is Hera, rather than
Athena or Aphrodite, or, as seems most appropriate, a mixture of
the three under the title potnia. This theory also begs
the question of why Hera is then angry at Troy if she has not in
fact been scorned by Paris (163-164).
O'B.'s most interesting interpretations are her elucidations
of the relationship between Hera the seasonal goddess and heroes.
O'B. follows other scholars in attributing Hera, hero, and Horai
to the common etymological Indo-European root of *ier,
"year, spring". Hera thus means "of the year, spring" and hero
"he who belongs to the goddess of the seasons" (5, 113-117,
137-139). Hera controls or tames the seasons in their cycle
(185), as well as controlling or taming the seasonal nature of
the Greek hero through death, or less frequently, marriage (117).
The defining quality of a hero of course is his short life or
early death, which O'B. argues is controlled or tamed by Hera
(118). The paradigmatic example of a hero controlled by Hera is
Herakles, whose birth and death are connected to her (117, 156).
O'B. reads the later version of the Herakles myth in which he
marries Hebe (heroes who die lose their %bh) and attains a
certain immortality as an Olympian perversion of Herakles'
original heroic death (150, 192).
Turning her attention to Achilles, O'B. illuminates some
aspects of a relationship between this Iliadic hero and Hera.
O'B. overstates her point when she claims that Hera is "the
source of [Achilles'] demonic power" (81), and that she is his
"tutelary goddess" (91) who "inspir[es] " him (92). She argues
unconvincingly earlier in the book that Achilles imbibes Hera's
x_low from Thetis, who transmits it to him because she
"suckle[d]" Hera (93-94, 80, 82). Achilles therefore inherits his
x_low from Hera (O'B. is a bit confusing about whether this is
biologically or psychologically determined, see 108 and 174). The
text of the Iliad does not provide a basis for these
assertions. Nevertheless, Hera does step in protectively to
restrain Achilles' m now in Iliad 1 (159) and she is also
instrumental in saving him from the river in Iliad 21
(87). O'B. also sees Hera's presence in the episode in Iliad
19 where Achilles' two horses announce his fate (190-191).
The tamed and yoked horses address the hero who is to be most
famously tamed by his fate. O'B. unfortunately does not refer to
the two recent works by Sheila Murnaghan ("Maternity and
Mortality in Homeric Poetry," Classical Antiquity 11.2
(1992): 242-264) and Laura Slatkin (The Power of Thetis,
Berkeley, 1991) which discuss maternity and the mortality of
heroes.
The final chapter of the book examines the panhellenic
transformations of Hera manifested mostly in the Iliad
(71). Hera's contact with Panhellenism has lessened her power
(172) and she has become the goddess of guile in the Dios
Apate of Iliad 14 and the Dios Ate of
Iliad 19 (175). In the Dios Ate in particular, O'B.
reverts to a religio-political explanation for Hera's behavior
that is not suggested by the text. O'B. states that Hera
interferes with Herakles' birth for "hegemony in the Argolid"
(176), that the scene represents a "struggle between Hera and
Zeus for regional sovereignty" (176), and that Hera "establishes"
cultic hegemony over the Argolid (178, again on 183), "thereby
rationalizing to a Panhellenic audience why Zeus was not always
considered supreme in Argolic myth". O'B. also analyzes Hera's
statements in Iliad 4.51-56 as the goddess ceding
political power to the new order (160-161), leaving "the
retrospective impression that she was responsible for the
disappearance of the palace civilization in the Argolid as well
as in Troy" (85). I am extremely wary of using the Iliad
in this way as a historical (or religio-historical document).
Likewise, O'B. repeatedly refers to an "early Argolic tradition",
"Argolic motifs" (110), "earlier Argolic song" (119, see 164,
165), and a substratum of Argolic myth (206) in the Iliad
which she does not demonstrate.
O'B. concludes: "This study is provisional and incomplete"
(203). This is particularly true for the question of the possible
influence of the Minoan potnia and tree goddess (205-206),
although O'B. makes passing mention of a Minoan connection with
respect to the Samian p_low (33), trees (126), and in the
Appendix on Delos (227). And, even though there has been no
analysis of Minoan elements, O'B. states: "Hence, even within her
circumscribed Iliadic role, her aggressive character is more the
agonistic Greek than the peace-loving Minoan" (205). O'B. also
relies upon the same broadly generalizing tone to strike a
feminist note: "Panhellenic patriarchy, however unconsciously,
transforms a goddess of soaring life into a scheming wife, and a
universal tamer into a wife who tames women to men" (206). Both
sentences are examples of the unreflexive or untheorized approach
which characterizes the book. A study of Hera would seem fertile
ground for a feminist approach, but while O'B. makes occasional
blunt nods to feminism such as the one just cited, she also often
seems to accept at face value the judgments made by characters in
the Iliadic text, such as Hera's "unremitting lust for
vengeance", her "demonic degeneracy", her representation as a
"savage goddess", and the accusations that Hera would eat raw
flesh (77), even though this is clearly an insult or
exaggeration. Conversely, O'B. avoids questions of Hera's
benignity in other instances, such as the necessity of binding
the goddess to ensure fertility, and more importantly, the
meaning and nature of a goddess who demands from or imposes upon
men in the prime of their lives an early death. Is this goddess
hostile to heroes, as she is to Herakles? (For a discussion of
Hera and Herakles' relationship see Nicole Loraux, "Herakles: The
Super-Male and the Feminine" in Before Sexuality). O'B.
also does not mention Hera's meaning for women, and constructs
Hera almost entirely upon her relationship to the male. The
stated aim of the series to which this book belongs, "Greek
Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches" edited by Gregory Nagy, is
to approach Classical subjects from an interdisciplinary and
theoretical perspective (xiii). Like Lowenstam's book in the same
series, this one does present an interdisciplinary approach, but
it is sadly lacking in critical theory.
Despite these misgivings, The Transformation of Hera
usefully gathers and presents a wide variety of information about
the early Hera, and provides stimulating and frequently
provocative analyses of Hera's ritual, mythic, and literary
dimensions.