In Magna Graecia, two Doric temples to Hera were constructed at Paestum, about 550 BCE and about 450 BCE. "The three cities I love best," the ox-eyed Queen of Heaven declares in the Iliad, book iv, "are Argos, Sparta and Mycenae of the broad streets." There were also temples to Hera in Olympia, Corinth, Tiryns, Perachora and the sacred island of Delos. Though the greatest and earliest free-standing temple to Hera was the Heraion of Samos, in the Greek mainland Hera was especially worshipped as "Argive Hera" ( Hera Argeia) at her sanctuary that stood between the former Mycenaean city-states of Argos and Mycenae, where the festivals in her honor called Heraia were celebrated. The Temple of Hera at Agrigento, Magna Graecia. Compared to this mighty goddess, who also possessed the earliest temple at Olympia and two of the great fifth and sixth-century temples of Paestum, the termagant of Homer and the myths is an "almost. Samos excavations have revealed votive offerings, many of them late 8th and 7th centuries BCE, which show that Hera at Samos was not merely a local Greek goddess of the Aegean: the museum there contains figures of gods and suppliants and other votive offerings from Armenia, Babylon, Iran, Assyria, Egypt, testimony to the reputation which this sanctuary of Hera enjoyed and to the large influx of pilgrims. There is also no evidence of tiles on this temple suggesting either the temple was never finished or that the temple was open to the sky.Įarlier sanctuaries, whose dedication to Hera is less certain, were of the Mycenaean type called "house sanctuaries". In one of these temples, we see a forest of 155 columns. This was replaced by the Polycratean temple of 540–530 BCE. The temple created by the Rhoecus sculptors and architects was destroyed between 570 and 560 BCE. There were many temples built on this site, so the evidence is somewhat confusing, and archaeological dates are uncertain. It was replaced later by the Heraion of Samos, one of the largest of all Greek temples (altars were in front of the temples under the open sky). Hera may have been the first deity to whom the Greeks dedicated an enclosed roofed temple sanctuary, at Samos about 800 BCE. Her name is attested in Mycenaean Greek written in the Linear B syllabic script as □□ e-ra, appearing on tablets found in Pylos and Thebes, as well in the Cypriotic dialect in the dative e-ra-i. van Windekens, offers "young cow, heifer", which is consonant with Hera's common epithet βοῶπις ( boōpis, "cow-eyed"). In a note, he records other scholars' arguments "for the meaning Mistress as a feminine to Heros, Master." John Chadwick, a decipherer of Linear B, remarks "her name may be connected with hērōs, ἥρως, 'hero', but that is no help since it too is etymologically obscure." A. So begins the section on Hera in Walter Burkert's Greek Religion. According to Plutarch, Hera was an allegorical name and an anagram of aēr (ἀήρ, "air"). The name of Hera has several possible and mutually exclusive etymologies one possibility is to connect it with Greek ὥρα hōra, season, and to interpret it as ripe for marriage and according to Plato ἐρατή eratē, "beloved" as Zeus is said to have married her for love.
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