I am the Goddess of women and marriage, and am famous for my jealous, cruel, and vengeful nature. But it’s not easy being married to the most amorous and adulterous God in Greek mythology. No wonder I am so jealous. Of course, being married to Zeus means that I am Queen of the Gods, yet I am still forced to put up with his constant affairs. So I take pleasure in inflicting cruel punishments on his consorts and their children. Obviously, I can’t harm Zeus seeing as he’s immortal, and so the only way I can hurt him is through hurting his lovers and children.
Zeus naturally tried to keep his affairs from me, and he was helped in this by Echo, the mountain nymph with the beautiful voice. For a long time, she managed to distract me from Zeus’ adultery by leading me away and amusing me with her long and entertaining stories. However, I soon found out about this disgusting trickery, and, feeling betrayed, decided to punish Echo severely. As she always loved her own voice so much, I thought of the cruellest punishment possible; I took away her voice so that she could only ever repeat another’s words. When she fell in love with the beautiful Narcissus, who rejected her, she spent the rest of her life pining away in misery, until all that was left was her voice, echoing the words of others forever. Even now, thinking of her fate fills me with glee.
Another of my triumphs was my vengeance on Lamia, another of Zeus’s lovers. She was the Queen of Libya, and the granddaughter of Poseidon. Yet I was, understandably, so filled with rage on discovering their affair, that I murdered their children, and cursed Lamia with the inability to close her eyes so that she would forever obsess over the image of their corpses. Of course, she was driven insane with grief, to my intense pleasure. She was so haunted by her suffering that she began to devour other children, gradually transforming into a monster, her face sickeningly distorted from her grisly deeds. She should have thought about the consequences of her actions before sleeping with my husband.
Of course, my plans are not always successful. I tried many times to kill the child of Zeus and Alcmene, who, insultingly, was named Heracles in my honour. I tried to destroy him from the moment of his birth, by forcing Ilythia, Goddess of childbirth, to keep him trapped in the womb. But my plan failed, and so when he was only a few months old, I sent two serpents to kill him, certain that they would succeed. Yet the child was stronger than I thought, and strangled a serpent in each hand. His nurse found him the next morning playing with their dead bodies. Of course, I was getting angry and desperate now, but no matter how many times I tried, I never managed to kill Heracles. I succeeded in driving him mad for a brief period of time, in which he killed his own children, but my murderous schemes were doomed to failure, to my eternally bitter disappointment. But there were always others, so many others, who wronged me, and who I did manage to punish.
My cruel, adulterous husband causes me unimaginable woe, yet although my life is miserable, I create enjoyment out of it by concocting the harshest, most twisted plans of vengeance I can think of. And so if you value your life and your sanity, I advise you to never do anything to anger me. Otherwise, you may find yourself eating your own children.
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