There are three places, and three only, in the poems, which could connect Juno with the Trojans. One is the Judgment of Paris (Il. xxiv. 29). The others are no more than verbal only. Hector swears by Jupiter “the loud thundering husband of Here[360].” And again, he wishes he had as certainly Jupiter for his father, and Juno for his mother[361], as he is certain that the day will bring disaster to the Greeks. We cannot, then, say that she was absolutely unknown to the Trojans in her Hellenic form, while they may have been more familiar with her eastern prototypes[362]. It does not, however, follow, that she was a deity of established worship among them. There is no notice of any institution or act of religion on the one side, or of care on the other, between her and any member of their race. In the mention of her among the Trojans, we may perhaps have an instance of the very common tendency of the heathen nations to adopt, by sympathy as it were, deities from one another; independently of all positive causes, such as migration, or ethnical or political connection.
The origin of Juno, which would thus on many grounds appear to have been Hellenic, appears to be referable to the principle, which I have called œconomy, and under which the relations of deities were thrown into the known forms of the human family. This process, according to the symmetrical and logical turn of the Greek mind, began when it was needed for its purpose, and stopped when it had done its work. Gods, that were to generate or rear other gods, were coupled; and partners were supplied by simple reflection of the character of the male, where there was no Idea or Power ready for impersonation that would serve the turn. Thus, Ῥέα, Earth or Matter, found a suitable mate for Κρόνος, or Time. But to make a match for Oceanus, his own mere reflected image, or feminine, was called into being under the name of Tethys. Such was, but only after the time of Homer, Amphitrite for Neptune, and Proserpine for Hades. In Homer the latter is more, and the former less than this. It was by nothing less than an entire metamorphosis, that the Greek Juno was educed from, or substituted for, some old deification of the Earth. She is much more a creation than an adaptation. What she really represents in Olympus, is supernatural wifehood; of which the common mark is, the want of positive and distinct attributes in the goddess. With this may be combined a negative sign not less pregnant with evidence; namely, the derivation and secondary handling of the prerogatives of the husband. The case of Juno is clear and strong under both heads. Her grandeur arises from her being clothed in the reflected rays of her husband’s supremacy, like Achilles in the flash of the Ægis. But positive divine function she has none whatever, except the slender one of presiding over maternity by her own agency, and by that of her figurative daughters, the Eilithuiæ. She is, when we contemplate her critically, the goddess of motherhood and of nothing else. And in truth, as the fire made Vulcan, and war made Mars, her mythological children, so motherhood made Juno, and is her type in actual nature. She became a goddess, to give effect to the principle of œconomy, to bring the children of Jupiter into the world, to enable man, in short, to construct that Olympian order, which he was to worship. Having been thus conceived, she assumed high powers and dignities in right of her husband, whose sister she was fabled to be, upon becoming also his wife, because either logical instinct, or the ancient traditions of our race rendered it a necessity for the Greeks to derive the divine, as well as the human, family from a single pair.