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.

In 1864 a piece of masonry half hidden in the soil attracted the attention of a scholar and member of the Institut de France who was visiting the island of Thasos. In one of his letters he mentions a ‘funerary bas-relief’ depicting a figure seated on a throne, next to another who is standing up. There were several further mentions of this piece in the intervening years, but finally in 1911 Charles Picard began the excavation of the remains on the island under the auspices of the French Archaeological Institute, and he completely uncovered the piece of stone. When this was done, it turned out not to be a free-standing funereal stele but a monument which was built into one of the gates of the city. It shows a seated deity holding a sceptre, and next to it a winged figure who is about to leave. Picard thought that the seated figure was Zeus and the winged one Iris or Eileithyia, and the reason he gave for this attribution was that the full image shows a small building, perhaps a shrine, in which the bas-reliefs of the two figures are located; however, above the apex of the pediment of this building an eagle is clearly depicted. In addition, the seated figure seemed to him too masculine to be a goddess, as some of his predecessors had thought. Several decades later, the column forming the other jamb of the gate was uncovered.

An analysis of brecht's most popular piece along tragic parameters.

This chapter explores in particular the 'greek presence' in the small organon, as manifested in the form of greek tragedy and/or its theorist aristotle. This is embedded within a broader analysis of this key work as a fundamenal contribution to theatre theory. New archival material in the form of brecht's type-written inserts into his personal copy of aristotle's 'poetics' is published for the first time and discussed in detail.