In searching through the religious monuments that survive of this worship, the inquirer has to be on his guard against the frequent false interpretations that confront him. There is no Greek divinity so difficult to recognize as Hera; for her figure has often been disguised by false restoration, and on the other hand the name has been applied to representations to which it cannot be proved to belong.

This ambiguity arises chiefly from the lack of any significant and peculiar attribute which may at once reveal her as clearly as Athena is revealed by the aegis, Artemis by the bow, or Demeter by the corn-stalks. Of all the various symbols, badges, attributes, fashions of drapery that have been supposed to be specially characteristic of Hera, there is none that is invariably found; and none that is not found with other divinities also, with the one exception of the peacock; but this comes too late into the artistic representations to be of much service. The veil might be supposed to be proper to the matron-goddess, the bride and the wife of Zeus; and she wears it sitting by his side in the terra-cotta group found at Samos; it appears in the Argive statuette of early fifthcentury style, and on the Selinus metope, but rarely, if ever, on the archaic vases, and only occasionally in works of perfected and later art; and the veiled head of Hera is exceptional on coins, the devices of Capua and the Boeotian Orchomenos being among the few instances from the Greek period.

As regards the monuments of the earlier pre-Pheidian period the most interesting question is how far they contain the germ of the Pheidian masterpiece, how far the artists had anticipated Pheidias in the discovery of forms appropriate to the ideal. But our evidence of the earliest archaic period is most scanty; no statues have survived, and probably very few existed; we have to collect testimony from coins, vase-paintings, and reliefs, and most of these belong to the later archaism. The means of expression that the workers in this period possessed was chiefly external and mechanical; character and personality were chiefly manifested by attributes. The most usual of these was the thunderbolt, whether he was represented in action or repose; also on some archaic works, there was not only the thunderbolt in his hand, but on his head a garland of flowers, and the character becomes more manifold by the accumulation of attributes. Nothing is told us in the ancient literature about the form or pose of these representations; but examining the series of archaic coins and vases, we gather that there were three commonly accepted types showing three varieties of pose: (i) we see the striding Zeus with the thunderbolt in his right hand levelled against an imaginary enemy or transgressor on Messenian tetradrachms, on later Attic coins, and in the very archaic bronze from Olympiaa, and the eagle is sometimes flying above his extended left arm or perched upon it; (2) the standing figure of Zeus in repose—for instance, on the coin of Athens holding the thunderbolt in his lowered right hand, and stretching out his left as though demanding libation.