Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Watching Ares rage for Troy, Hera and Athena resolve to intervene. They go to Zeus and win his assent to drive Ares from the field. Hera harnesses her horses: bronze-rimmed wheels, eight-spoked, on an iron axle; the car is gold and silver, the lash golden; Hephaestus’s craft is in the fittings. Athena strips off the soft robe she wore at her father’s house, puts on the tunic of Zeus, arms for bitter war, and takes the great tasselled aegis fringed with Panic, Strife, Force, and the Gorgon’s head. She mounts beside Hera; the gates of heaven, kept by the Hours, open; they drive down between earth and sky to the Greek camp. Hera takes the form of voice and stature of Stentor and shouts to shame the Achaeans: shame, Argives, while Achilles still sits idle—yet even without him the Trojans used to cower at the ditch. The arming scene is Homeric spectacle: two goddesses prepared as warriors, Hera’s ornate chariot the vehicle of divine descent. Catalogue it apart from the later spear-thrust so the ritual of Olympian arming and the chariot itself stand as their own set-piece before the wounding of Ares.