She was naturally jealous of the other
wives of Zeus. Zeus on one occasion beat her, and threw her son
Hephaestos out of Olympus; on another occasion he hung her out of
Olympus with her arms tied and two great weights attached to her feet--a
very brutal and ungentlemanly trick--but the Greeks transposed this into
a beautiful symbol: the two weights, they say, represent the earth and
sea, "an illustration of how all the phenomena of the visible sky were
supposed to hang dependent on the highest god of heaven!" (Ibid., p.
47.) Juno probably regarded the transaction in an altogether different
light; and she therefore United with Poseidon, the king's brother, and
his daughter Athena, in a rebellion to put the old fellow in a
strait-jacket, "and would have succeeded had not Thetis brought to his
aid the sea-giant AEgaeon," probably a war-ship. She seems in the main,
however, to have been a good wife, and was the type of all the womanly
virtues.
Poseidon, the first king of Atlantis, according to Plato, was, according
to Greek mythology, a brother of Zeus, and a son of Chronos. In the
division of the kingdom he fell heir to the ocean and its islands, and
to the navigable rivers; in other words, he was king of a maritime and
commercial people.
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