All hail, Hera, the queen of the Olympian gods, long-suffering (and occasionally vengeful) wife of Zeus, revered throughout the Greek world.
Found in Olympia by the German excavation team in the late 19th century at the Temple of Hera there, this is a colossal (52 cm tall – double life sized) early Archaic head, dating stylistically to around 580 B.C. Archaeologists initially identified it with the cult statue in the Heraion, and frequently adhere to that identification. Pausanias described the statue of the goddess enthroned with her husband Zeus standing beside her, evidently still standing within the temple when he visited some seven centuries later.
The head itself fits the bill to a large extent. Stylistically she’s spot on for the early 6th century B.C.: archaic smile, frontal gaze, intricate hair and polos crown – made of local limestone and otherwise unaccountably large. The partial relief by her proper left ear has been explained typically part of the throne Pausanias wrote about, and other elements of this throne might have been discovered
It’s a romantic and terribly appealing thought, that this extremely early cult statue might still have been on view centuries later, and still found more or less in the correct place millennia later. But there have been conflicting opinions. The early temple of Hera (incredibly important architecturally, being among the very oldest in the Greek world with an outer row of columns (peripteros)) was nearly entirely wood and mud brick, renovated over time with marble columns and accoutrements in a variety of styles. More to the point, the opisthodomos (the back room of the temple) was used by the Roman period as a sort of depot for artistic and votive treasures: the chest of Kypselos, Praxiteles’ Hermes and Dionysos, to name some highlights.
More cold-blooded archaeologists have suggested that this head was not the goddess brought to earth, but perhaps a sphinx. Fair enough, and food for thought. With her almost unheard of size, exquisitely carved, and in the right place and the right time…one has to wonder!
