Hera is named on at least one Linear B tablet with Zeus, who elsewhere has another consort called by a feminine form of his name (Diwia). But Hera's marriage to Zeus must be quite old and is plainly another reflection of the sacred marriage between sky god and earth mother. She had many temples, even from very early times, and was plainly more important in cult than in myth, where she suffered from her role as Zeus' constantly wronged wife. Homer's Iliad (1.399-406) refers to a lost story in which Hera, along with Poseidon and Athena, led a revolt against Zeus and tried to bind him in chains before Thetis came to his rescue. In most other Greek myths, however, Hera's role is that of jealous wife punishing Zeus' paramours and their offspring.

Hera's major cult sites were the Greek city of Argos and the Aegean island of Samos . At both these sites she already had temples by c. 800 B.C., replaced by larger temples by the 6 th century B.C. At Olympia, Hera had a temple and cult statue even before Zeus and was also celebrated every four years in a festival where women presented her statue with a new peplos (as the Athenians did for Athena in the Panathenaia) and ran races (dressed in short chitons ) in the stadium. The mythic aetion for these races is the story of the contest and marriage of Hippodameia and Pelops, which we will study later in this course.