k lands. When he invaded Thessaly he seems to have left Dione
behind and wedded the Queen of the conquered territory. Hera's permanent
epithet is 'Argeia', 'Argive'. She is the Argive Kore or Year-Maiden, as
Athena is the Attic, Cypris the Cyprian. But Argos in Homer denotes two
different places, a watered plain in the Peloponnese and a watered plain
in Thessaly. Hera was certainly the chief goddess of Peloponnesian Argos
in historic times, and had brought her consort Herakles[56:3] along with
her, but at one time she seems to have belonged to the Thessalian Argos.

She helped Thessalian Jason to launch the ship _Argo_, and they
launched it from Thessalian Pagasae. In the Argonautica she is a
beautiful figure, gracious and strong, the lovely patroness of the young
hero. No element of strife is haunting her. But in the _Iliad_ for some
reason she is unpopular. She is a shrew, a scold, and a jealous wife.
Why? Miss Harrison suggests that the quarrel with Zeus dates from the
time of the invasion, when he was the conquering alien and she the
native queen of the land.[57:1] It may be, too, that the Ionian poets
who respected their own Apollo and Athena and Poseidon, regarded Hera as
representing some race or tribe that they disliked. A goddess of Dorian
Argos might be as disagreeable as a Dorian. It seems to be for some
reason like this that Aphrodite, identified with Cyprus or some centre
among Oriental barbarians, is handled with so much disrespect; that
Ares, the Thracian Kouros, a Sun-god and War-god, is treated as a mere
bully and coward and general pest.[57:2]

There is not much faith in these gods, as they appear to us in the
Homeric Poems, and not much respect, except perhaps for Apollo and
Athena and Poseidon. The buccaneer kings of the Heroic Age, cut loose
from all local and tribal pieties, intent only on personal gain and
glory, were not the people to build up a powerful religious faith. They
left that, as they left agriculture and handiwork, to the nameless
common folk.[57:3] And it was not likely that the bards of cultivated
and scientific Ionia should waste much religious emotion on a system
which was clearly meant more for romance than for the guiding of life.

Yet the power of romance is great. In the memory of Greece the kings and
gods of the Heroic Age were transfigured. What had been really an age of
buccaneering violence became in memory an age of chivalry and splendid
adventure. The traits that were at