The sixth month of the year: half-way through. The gentlest month.

It is hard not to feel the tension drop at the ingress of long, warming days and lurid neon buttercups and at the promise of bees round the flowering grass and fruit-flies circling the ceiling lights. We’re not in the swelter-skelter yet – train tracks aren’t being alleged to have buckled in the heat. It is, if I can be forgiven the prosaicness, “nice”. But not “too nice”. It is a rational sort of pleasant. Wholesomeness sent by nature.

Queen of the Months

One of my favourite poems about June is Marge Piercey’s “More than Enough” which, even in the title, I think sums up the point I’ve just made. I like this stanza the most (not least for the joy of a poet called “Piercey” using an arrowhead as a metaphor):

The arrowhead is spreading its creamy

clumps of flower and the blackberries

are blooming in the thickets. Season of

joy for the bee. The green will never

again be so green, so purely and lushly

June = Juno: Queen of the Gods as this is Queen of the Months. And talk of arrowheads and Juno inevitably brought into my mind (more on that in a moment) the first book of the Iliad, when Apollo is plaguing the insolent Greeks with disease-bearing arrows and the Queen of the Gods – white-armed Hera – steps in out of pity.

Hera is often portrayed – certainly in post-Homeric literature – as a sort of divine shrew, a killjoy bunny-boiler, vengefully henpecking her randy-old-goat husband for whatever indiscretion he’s been up to. I don’t think that is borne out so clearly by the Hera of the Iliad. In fact, I read her here as a goddess of equanimity, rational calm, coolness and compassion.

Hera in the Iliad - frenzy but not as we know it

Unlike some of the other Gods, Hera often appears more as a force, or as a sort of anterior presence behind other Gods (perhaps like certain sophistic traditions or Vedic/Brahminic ideas) than as a positive character in her own right. Thus, like earthbound Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, she herself says “It is hard for gods to be shown in their true shape” (χαλεποὶ δὲ θεοὶ φαίνεσθαι ἐναργεῖς, XXI, 131).

She is myriad in her self-presentation: in the space of ten lines in Book V she trembles like a dove (V, 777) and, taking on the form of Stentor, imbues him with the booming vocal power of fifty men (V, 784-6) (a “Stentorian” voice is merely one turbo-charged by the Queen of the Gods).

Her entry into the Iliad is not direct, but through or in Achilles:

ἐννῆμαρ μὲν ἀνὰ στρατὸν ᾤχετο κῆλα θεοῖο,
τῇ δεκάτῃ δ’ ἀγορὴν δὲ καλέσσατο λαὸν Ἀχιλλεύς·
τῷ γὰρ ἐπὶ φρεσὶ θῆκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη
κήδετο γὰρ Δαναῶν, ὅτι ῥα θνήσκοντας ὁρᾶτο.

Nine days up and down the host ranged [Apollo’s] arrows,
On the tenth, Achilleus called the people into assembly,
A thing put into his [phrénes] by the goddess of the white arms, Hera:
Who had pity on the Danaans when she saw them dying (I 53-56).

I underlined the phrase ἐπὶ φρεσὶ: into Achilles’s phrenes. What are his phrenes? We have inherited into English two related words. The first is frenzy, so we know it is something to do with emotion and cognition. But also diaphragm, so we know it is something bodily and physical. For the Greeks, the phrenes were the physical seat in the body of both menos and thumos in the living (cognitive forms with difference emphases (but whence mental and enthusiasm)) as opposed to the psyche of the dead: when Patrokles was killed, his body could not enter the underworld because his menos and thumos were still embodied physically in the phrenes of his mortal remains (XXIII, 71 et seq). More ghoulishly, the psyche of the seer Teiresias (Odyssey, X, 492) is described as the only one in Hades to be endowed with Phrenes (X 493); as such, he is the only one in Hades to recognise Odysseus without having to drink blood (XI, 91).

The phrenes were thought to be sited in the thorax (thus diaphragm): so just as now, when we describe emotion and thought as forming in the heart, this was the location through which the force of reason in the broader universe could act on the minds of mortals. (The Murray/Wyatt Loeb translation says that Hera “put it in his heart”. Others don’t take advantage of this physical evocation: old Chapman says that “heaven’s white-arm’d Queen…suggested it”; Pope says she “inspired” it – which is physical but possibly the wrong bit of the body (though a diaphragm is of course involved in breathing and hiccough suppression); Wilson says “put it into his mind”, which is of course clear.

Hera’s next mention is, again, not in her own body but in that of Athena. At a moment of crisis, as Achilles is about to give expression to his rage and slay odious Agamemnon (I 194), Hera sends Athena to urge restraint:

ἕως ὃ ταῦθ’ ὥρμαινε κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν,
ἕλκετο δ’ ἐκ κολεοῖο μέγα ξίφος, ἦλθε δ’ Ἀθήνη
οὐρανόθεν: πρὸ γὰρ ἧκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη
ἄμφω ὁμῶς θυμῷ φιλέουσά τε κηδομένη τε:

Now as he weighed in [phrenes] and [thumos] these two courses
and was drawing from its scabbard the great sword, Athene descended
from the sky. For Hera the goddess of the white arms sent her,
who loved both men equally in her heart and cared for them. (I 193-196)

Homer then deliberately emphasises Hera’s animating role when Athena explains her sudden appearance (I 195-6):

ἦλθον ἐγὼ παύσουσα τὸ σὸν μένος, αἴ κε πίθηαι,
οὐρανόθεν: πρὸ δέ μ’ ἧκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη
ἄμφω ὁμῶς θυμῷ φιλέουσά τε κηδομένη τε:

‘I have come to stay your anger––but will you obey me?––
from the sky; and the goddess of the white arms Hera sent me,
who loves both of you equally in her heart and cares for you.’ (I.207-209)

It is quite something to love equally characters as purposely distinct as Achilles and Agamemnon, giving a sense of the magnanimity with which Hera brings rationality and compassion into the world.

Importantly, Hera is an observer: she watches the developments in the field and takes steps through the agonists’ phrenes to bring a bit of sense to proceedings; she very often overhears developments, such as Thetis’s early beseeching of Zeus on Achilles’s behalf (and is quick to figure out any scheme of her husband’s). And later, in book 24 when Thetis ascends again to Olympus, Hera – in her last act in the whole poem - offers her hospitality and a comforting ear to Thetis’ phren (singular this time and with the prefix εὔ: good, happy, glad, pleasant, sweet etc.)

Ἥρη δὲ χρύσεον καλὸν δέπας ἐν χερὶ θῆκε
καί ῥ’εὔφρην’ ἐπέεσσι: Θέτις δ’ ὤρεξε πιοῦσα.

Hera put into her hand a beautiful golden goblet and spoke to her to comfort her [phrén], and Thetis accepting drank from it. (XXIV 101-102).

So we see Hera not as wrathful shrew, but as a disembodied force of magnanimous love, with reason and compassion but not unrestricted passion. She is the force that stops the heated brawl; she is the force that puts a drink in your hand and tells you talk about it. She is an eye in the sky…

Eye in the sky

Those were my reflections on the advent of June and I thought there was a pleasant enough symmetry between June as the month of pleasure-but-not-in-excess and Juno/Hera as a disembodied force of rational compassion.

But then I learnt that something special is going to take place this month: apparently we are at a stage in the moon’s 18.6 year cycle where (i) because it’s the summer solstice, she will sit low and the sky, and (ii) that will happen at the same time as the full moon. So we will see the Rose Moon – June’s full moon - as a huge, fat eyeball in the sky later in the month, watching events and – hopefully – intervening to promote reason over frenzy. Like the Queen of the Gods herself, wholesomeness sent by nature.