Goddess of youth, daughter of Zeus and Hera and cupbearer of the Olympians, who poured the gods their nectar before she was given in marriage to the deified Heracles upon his ascent to heaven.1
Hebe was the daughter that Hera, joined in love with Zeus as his last and lasting wife, brought forth alongside Ares and Eileithyia. Apollodorus likewise lists her first among the children Zeus begat on Hera — Hebe, Ilithyia and Ares — so that across the sources she is the daughter of both the king and the queen of Olympus together, never a solitary birth.2
On Olympus her office was the cup. As the gods held assembly seated on Zeus's golden floor, in their midst the queenly Hebe poured them nectar, and they pledged one another with golden goblets while they looked out upon Troy. Homer shows her at her other household tasks as well: she fitted the curved bronze wheels to Hera's chariot when the queen made ready to harness her horses, and after Ares was healed of his wound she bathed the war god and clad him in beautiful raiment.3
Her great destiny came with the apotheosis of Heracles. Hesiod sings that mighty Heracles, the valiant son of neat-ankled Alcmena, when he had finished his grievous toils, made Hebe the child of great Zeus and gold-shod Hera his shy wife in snowy Olympus, where he now lives among the undying gods, untroubled and ageless all his days.4
Apollodorus tells how the union came about: when Heracles had been wafted to heaven on a cloud amid thunder he obtained immortality, was reconciled at last to Hera, and married her daughter Hebe, by whom he had sons, Alexiares and Anicetus.5
An older notion held that Heracles was a mere shade among the dead, and the Odyssey reconciles the two traditions in the underworld scene where Odysseus meets only the phantom of Heracles in Hades — for the hero himself, the poem adds, takes his joy in the feast among the immortal gods and has to wife Hebe of the fair ankles, daughter of great Zeus and of Hera of the golden sandals. These verses, splitting Heracles into a Hades phantom and an Olympian bridegroom, are widely judged a later interpolation reconciling the hero's grave with the marriage-on-Olympus tradition.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
