Hebe

The account

Hebe is youth in the specific sense of the years when a person is at their physical peak, and her job on Olympos is to pour the nectar. Homer shows her doing it, and also helping her brother Ares out of his armour and washing him after a defeat, and harnessing the horses to Hera's chariot — she is the household's competent young daughter. She is displaced as cupbearer when Zeus takes Ganymede, and the tradition does not comment on how she felt about it. Her marriage is the reward at the end of the longest career in Greek myth: after the pyre on Oita, Herakles is made immortal and given Hebe as his wife, so the man who spent his life on impossible labours gets youth permanently. Her cult at Phlious was unusual and interesting — Pausanias says the sanctuary was a grove of cypresses, that there was no statue, and that it was a place of asylum where suppliants were safe and prisoners who were released hung their chains on the trees.