Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hera sees Poseidon at work among the ships and resolves to deceive Zeus so the sea-god may fight unchecked. On Olympus she adorns herself: ambrosia, oil, a robe Athena wrought, earrings, a veil bright as the sun; from Aphrodite—on a false pretext of reconciling Oceanus and Tethys—she borrows the embroidered cestus of desire and love-talk. She goes to Lemnos and wins Hypnos, Sleep, with a promise of Pasithea as bride; Hypnos fears Zeus’s anger from the old Heracles storm, yet yields when she swears by Styx. They go to Ida; Hypnos hides in a pine as a bird. Hera approaches Zeus on Gargarus. He is seized with desire as at their first secret bedding. She claims she is journeying to Oceanus; he proposes they lie together now, and he covers them with a golden cloud. He sleeps, conquered by love and sleep. Hypnos runs to tell Poseidon that Zeus is bound in slumber; Poseidon then leads the Achaeans in open, godlike force until Zeus wakes in Book 15 and drives him back to the sea. The Dios apate is Hera’s counter-move to the ban she could not break by arms: seduction and sleep as strategy. Catalogue the toilette, the cestus, Hypnos’s bargain, and the cloud-bed as one deception-plot.