A great obscurity hangs about the name, the origin, and the character of this goddess. The name at least seems to be Greek, and to be an epithet that may signify the ‘far-off one’ or the ‘far-darting one,’ if we consider it as a shortened form of ἑκατηβόλος; but no explanation that has been offered is very certain or significant.

As to her origin, she is usually accepted as a Hellenic divinity, and the question has scarcely been discussed by modern writers. If this view is correct, she was one whose worship must have been obscured in the earliest period among the leading Greek tribes, and have revived later. For there is no mention of her in the Iliad and Odyssey, nor in any fragment of the ‘Homeric’ epic; although, had the epic poets of the eighth or seventh century known of her as she was known to the later Greek, she would probably have been noticed in such a passage, for instance, as Odysseus' descent to Hades. Again, neither early nor late did any real mythology grow up about her: we find nothing but a few stories of little value or credit, invented sometimes to explain some of her obscure titles, such as ῞Αγγελος; and only once does she play some part in a dramatic myth, namely, in the Giganto machy as described by Apollodorus, as the legends of the later period bring all the deities into the action and Hekate is named among them, though she is not found in the early accounts of the battle.

The figure of Eileithyia, whose worship was ancient and widely prevalent, illustrates the strong tendency in the Greek polytheism towards the multiplicity of personages; for while Hera and Artemis were pre-eminently goddesses of childbirth, the goddess Eileithyia was developed to take special charge of this department, and to play a direct physical part in assisting the processes of birth. She was developed in all probability out of Hera herself, and is identified most frequently with her, though sometimes also with Artemis. The name—whatever its exact original sense may have been—has an adjectival form, and was primarily, we may believe, an epithet of Hera, and then detached from her and treated as the name of a separate divinity. We hear of the worship of Hera Eileithyia in Attica, and there is some reason for believing that it existed in Argos also; a passage in Hesychius seems to explain Εἰλείθυια as the Argive Hera, and Suidas mentions a strange statue of Hera at Argos which represented her with a pair of shears in her hand, an emblem which can scarcely belong to her as an agricultural goddess, and which can only be interpreted as alluding to the cutting of the umbilical cord.

It is true also that the assimilation of the goddess of birth to Artemis seems to have been no less frequent.

The idea of the righteous control of human life, which did not conspicuously appear in the cults that have just been examined, essentially belonged to the worship of Nemesis. This figure lost much of its personal force in proportion as it developed in moral significance. In the beginning the name denoted more than a mere moral abstraction; for there is reason to suppose that both Nemesis and Upis were connected titles or surnames of Artemis or Artemis Aphrodite. In regard to the latter, of which the Doric form is Ὦπις, the Ionic Οὖπις, there is no doubt; its usual explicit reference is to Artemis, who was worshipped by this title in Lacedaemon and probably Troezen. We have, indeed, only the testimony of late and learned writers such as Callimachus and the lexicographers; but this was drawn either from earlier literature or from knowledge of actual legend and cult. And we have indirect evidence that is even more trustworthy: we hear in Athenaeus of the οὔπιγγοι, the sacred formulae or hymns by which Artemis was addressed at Troezen, the name implying the invocation and the worship of Artemis Upis; and mention has already been made of the Delian maiden Upis who with Arge first brought the Hyperborean offerings to the island, and arrived there in company with the divinities themselves, as Herodotus emphatically says.

We may believe that all the important centres of the worship of Hera possessed a temple-image, though this is not always recorded. But only very few of the ideas which we have found in this religion appear to have been definitely expressed in specially characteristic monuments. The record of these, so far as it is explicit, shows that she was usually represented as the wedded wife of Zeus, the goddess who cherished the lawful union of men and women; and this accords with the main idea of the cults and with her general character in Greek legend. Her earliest dyaXixara or symbols were, like those of most Greek divinities, aniconic and wholly inexpressive. A stock cut out from the tree was her badge at Thespiae25, her first sacred emblem at Samos was a board96, at Argos a lofty pillar in the primitive period96. And of most of the earliest images mentioned by Pausanias and other writers, nothing significant is told us. The most interesting is the archaic image of Hera, a ξόανoν or wooden statue, carved by Smilisa for the temple in Samos, probably about the middle of the seventh century B.C.97 This supplanted an older idol, and retained its place in the island, worship down to the latest period.

Among the monuments that illustrate the worship of Athena, we find the coin-representations in some respects the most important. Not only do they give us manifold testimony of the character that belonged to her in the national religion, but they also prove more clearly than any other monumental evidence the very wide diffusion of her cult.

The very large number of vases upon which her figure appears have more to do with mythology than with public worship; perhaps the only type of the goddess, preserved in vase-paintings, which can be certainly recognized as connected with cult is that of the warlike Athena holding her shield and brandishing her spear, the type of the ancient Palladia and probably of the Athena Polias.

As regards the works of sculpture, those to which any definite cult-name can be attached are very few; but many, and especially those that can be connected with the creations of Pheidias, are of very great value for the history of religious art. We have no proof of the prevalence of wholly aniconic images of Athena, and it has been shown that the religion of Pallas contained comparatively few ‘ survivals’ of primitive thought and primitive ritual. The earliest monuments that have come down to us express ideas that are already relatively advanced.

In searching through the religious monuments that survive of this worship, the inquirer has to be on his guard against the frequent false interpretations that confront him. There is no Greek divinity so difficult to recognize as Hera; for her figure has often been disguised by false restoration, and on the other hand the name has been applied to representations to which it cannot be proved to belong.

This ambiguity arises chiefly from the lack of any significant and peculiar attribute which may at once reveal her as clearly as Athena is revealed by the aegis, Artemis by the bow, or Demeter by the corn-stalks. Of all the various symbols, badges, attributes, fashions of drapery that have been supposed to be specially characteristic of Hera, there is none that is invariably found; and none that is not found with other divinities also, with the one exception of the peacock; but this comes too late into the artistic representations to be of much service. The veil might be supposed to be proper to the matron-goddess, the bride and the wife of Zeus; and she wears it sitting by his side in the terra-cotta group found at Samos; it appears in the Argive statuette of early fifthcentury style, and on the Selinus metope, but rarely, if ever, on the archaic vases, and only occasionally in works of perfected and later art; and the veiled head of Hera is exceptional on coins, the devices of Capua and the Boeotian Orchomenos being among the few instances from the Greek period.

As regards the monuments of the earlier pre-Pheidian period the most interesting question is how far they contain the germ of the Pheidian masterpiece, how far the artists had anticipated Pheidias in the discovery of forms appropriate to the ideal. But our evidence of the earliest archaic period is most scanty; no statues have survived, and probably very few existed; we have to collect testimony from coins, vase-paintings, and reliefs, and most of these belong to the later archaism. The means of expression that the workers in this period possessed was chiefly external and mechanical; character and personality were chiefly manifested by attributes. The most usual of these was the thunderbolt, whether he was represented in action or repose; also on some archaic works, there was not only the thunderbolt in his hand, but on his head a garland of flowers, and the character becomes more manifold by the accumulation of attributes. Nothing is told us in the ancient literature about the form or pose of these representations; but examining the series of archaic coins and vases, we gather that there were three commonly accepted types showing three varieties of pose: (i) we see the striding Zeus with the thunderbolt in his right hand levelled against an imaginary enemy or transgressor on Messenian tetradrachms, on later Attic coins, and in the very archaic bronze from Olympiaa, and the eagle is sometimes flying above his extended left arm or perched upon it; (2) the standing figure of Zeus in repose—for instance, on the coin of Athens holding the thunderbolt in his lowered right hand, and stretching out his left as though demanding libation.