To evaluate Hera according to the criteria generally used among humans would mean making her a shrewish wife and an unworthy mother. Is there not, one might ask, a fundamental irony in taking a goddess who was so scrupulous in observing and enforcing the boundaries between the human and the divine sphere, and then subjecting her to interpretations that project onto the gods specific features of human life? The widely practised reading of Hera through the prism of an anthropomorphic morality has considerably confused and impoverished our understanding of the goddess. To maintain this interpretation, scholars have found it necessary to develop two parallel ways of reading the available evidence: limit the goddess to the role of legitimate wife in the cults of the cities and separate off the image of the ‘untamed shrew’, restricting it to traditional narratives. The consequence of this approach was to neglect a whole series of elements which do not fit into this diptych-model of the goddess. Thus Hera’s status as a sovereign was relegated to being a local echo of a past which had disappeared, whereas the status of ‘the Hera of Zeus’ as queen of Olympus was greatly underestimated in cultic contexts. In addition, the jealous and angry Hera of the mythological dictionaries, excellent as many of them are in their fashion, acted as a kind of magnet to draw in the diverse aspects of the cholos of Hera, which drastically reduced its complexity.