"It is worth paying closer attention to the role of Hera in the account of Tiresias and in the myth of Dionysus more generally. Hera had been central to Dionysus’s acceptance as a god at least since the early archaic period, especially in the Greek East. Her role is clearest in the story, told already by Alcaeus, about how Dionysus was first admitted to Olympus. The myth recounts how Hera, after giving birth to her son Hephaestus, became disgusted by his disfigured form and cast him out of Olympus. Hephaestus soon got his revenge by sending her, as a gift, a throne booby-trapped with hidden bonds. Predictably, she took the bait and became trapped. When Ares failed in his attempt forcibly to bring Hephaestus back to release his mother, Dionysus came to her rescue: he got Hephaestus drunk and easily brought him back to Olympus to release her. The result was that Dionysus, until then barred by Hera, was admitted to the company of the gods on Olympus.
There is reason to suspect that Hera, in agreeing to Dionysus’s entry to Olympus, functions as a sort of adoptive mother. In the archaic Lesbos of Alcaeus and Sappho, we encounter Dionysus as part of a trinity with Zeus and Hera, which was worshiped throughout the island (Alc. fr. 129.1–9 PMG; Sapph. fr. 17 PMG). Scholars have suggested that Hera functions here as a form of the great goddess, with Zeus as her paredros and Dionysus a “divine child.” … Hera’s role as a divine “mother” who has veto power over the sons of Zeus and mortal women who would be counted among the Olympian gods is attested also in the case of Heracles. …
While the issue of how Dionysus came to be accepted as an Olympian god was a preoccupation already in the archaic period, Euripides’ Tiresias goes a step further and presents this issue of divine legitimacy in the language of civic legitimacy, especially in the terms of Pericles’ citizenship law of 451 b.c.e. We may begin at lines 289–90 where Tiresias says that “when … Zeus … introduced (ἀνήγαγεν) the baby to Olympus as a god, Hera wished to expel (ἐκβαλεῖν) him.” We are presumably meant to understand either that Tiresias believes that Dionysus’s godhead is not fully established until he is accepted by Hera on Olympus or that he is following a version of the story in which the son of Semele was not born a god, but was later made a god by his father. … What I want to emphasize here is that Euripides describes this “introduction” in terms very similar to a man’s introduction of a son to his phratry or deme, an act that not infrequently met with opposition from one or more fellow phrateres or demesmen.
The word that Euripides uses to describe Zeus’s attempt to introduce his son Dionysus to Olympus is ἀνάγω, a word that is generic enough but nevertheless close to the technical word for phratry or deme induction in fifth-century Athens, which was εἰσάγω. Euripides may have altered the technical word εἰσάγω to ἀνάγω, if for no other reason, to reflect the spatial position of Olympus vis-à-vis earth. Hera’s wish to “expel” the young Dionysus is rendered in Tiresias’s account by the verb ἐκβάλλω, whereas the normal Athenian expression to describe a phratry’s or deme’s rejection of a candidate is ἐξελαύνω or ἀπελαύνω (expel) or, more technically, ἀποψηφίζομαι (vote out). While ἐκβάλλω is much more generic than these technical words, it is a common term at Athens to describe the process of stripping a citizen of his civic rights and banishing him. And it is also the normal word to describe the exposure of children, in which case Hera would be playing the role of the new father, who decides whether to reject the child of the “maternal,” post-partum Zeus.
If any of these hints of Athenian phratry and deme procedures for evaluating a son’s claim to citizenship are in fact present in this passage, then the collocation θεᾷ θεός at the end of line 296, if it refers to Zeus’s (θεός) providing a hostage to Hera (θεᾷ),112 would certainly call to mind Pericles’ citizenship law of 451 b.c.e., which held that only a union of astē and astos could produce a citizen, a requirement that was frequently the basis upon which demesmen rejected a man’s request that his son be inducted into the deme."
- The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor in Classical Greek Literature by David Leitao
