Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In *Iliad* 15 Zeus, angry that Hera has deceived him into sleep so Poseidon can aid the Achaeans, reminds her of an earlier punishment. He once hung her from heaven with two anvils fastened to her feet and her hands bound with a golden chain (or cord) that none of the gods could cut; whichever of them tried to free her, Zeus seized and hurled from the threshold. The hanging is not staged in the present of the poem but brandished as memory and threat: Hera already knows the cost of crossing him, and the other Olympians remember that even pity for the queen ended in freefall. The episode binds to the tradition that Hephaestus was cast from Olympus when he tried to help his mother—landing on Lemnos after a day’s fall—so the anvils, the chain, and the smith’s lameness form one Homeric cluster of Zeus’s household violence. Apollodorus preserves the suspension among Hera’s sufferings. Unlike the golden-throne comedy (Hephaestus’s later revenge on Hera), this is pure sovereign force: sky-father binding sky-mother between heaven and earth until her defiance breaks. Catalogue it as the Iliadic Hera-punishment distinct from both casts of Hephaestus and from the throne trap.