Guys, did you realize that if you combine the version found in Hesiod's Theogony where Zeus takes Leto as a consort and has children with her before he marries Hera who, on her part, is not mentioned as persecuting Leto in any way and the version found in sources like the Homeric Hymn to Apollo or Kallimachos' Hymn to Delos where Hera, already involved with Zeus and with grown children by him at the time, does persecute the pregnant Leto you end up with a version where Hera tries to punish Zeus's partner even though she wasn't even married to him at that point? Such a crazy bitch! What do you mean that's not the proper way to analyze something?

"… he [Zeus] left the house of Hera, he refused the bed of Dione, he threw away the love of Deo, he fled from Themis, he deserted Leto - no charm was left for him but only in union with Persephoneia." (Nonnos, Dionysiaca Book 5)

When your harem of adult women doesn't do it for you, only your young virgin daughter does.

Demeter-Persephone and Leto-Artemis are both examples of particularly close and loving mother-daughter relationships. The difference is that in the first case the mother is the protective one always ready to defend her daughter, while in the second it is the daughter who vehemently protects and defends her mother.

(6) All in the family : the Apollonian triad in Attic art of the sixth and fifth centuries BC | Lavinia Foukara - Academia.edu

Zeus: Apollo deserves imprisonment in Tartaros for what he has done.

Zeus internally: C'mon someone step in, I really don't want to do this.

Leto: Please go easy on him, he is your son and you know well he's the best you've got.

Zeus: Oh alright, I suppose a bit of servitude to a mortal will be a fitting punishment for killing the makers of the weapons that ensure my supremacy.

I can't tell you why, but I can tell you that Leto's case is not unique. Consider Kallisto: in what appears to be the earliest account of the story (attributed to Hesiod) Hera seems to play no role whatsoever, only for subsequent sources to variously make her the cause for Kallisto's transformation into a bear, for Artemis shooting her and even for the constellation she becomes not being able to set into the sea. And as Sandra Boehringer points out, "Hera appears to play a secondary role,: she does not feature at all in several versions, and has little impact on events as such. In stories where she does appear, she performs an action that is accomplished by other agents in other versions, without introducing anything completely new; and she has no effect on the final outcome." I find it quite possible that Hera was a later addition to the myth.

Hell, even her connection with Semele's death, popular as it is, seems to have appeared for the first time in the fifth century, or at least no earlier source for it survives. Or what about Io's son Epaphos? All of a sudden, in Apollodoros' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae Hera apparently hates him and arranges for his kidnapping or death even though there is no trace of this idea before. Same goes for Aigina and her son, to whom Hera pays no attention before Ovid's Metamorphoses. And since I was posting about the Vatican Mythographers recently, the first one makes her responsible for Perseus being sent to kill Medusa, since she wants him destroyed.

Now as I always point out, a lot of ancient texts are lost and just because a particular variant only appears in, say, Apollodoros or Hyginus or Nonnos or even the Vatican Mythographers doesn't mean it can't be much older than that. Still, while Hera's wrath and revenge (including against Zeus's other women and especially children/Herakles) are motifs that appear even in the earliest works of Greek literature, I don't think anyone can dispute the fact that she becomes more and more a caricature of a jealous wife and wicked stepmother as time goes on. Maybe it made for juicier drama? Provided an easy antagonist? Misogyny? Whatever the case, I guess there's no surprise that modern writers carry on this tradition.

I find it so sweet that Leto has cult epithets like Meter (Mother), Euteknos (Happy in children), and Kalliteknos (With beautiful children).

Honestly in order to offer a comprehensive response to this I'd have to comb through basically all ancient Greek literature, so instead I'll just give you a small list off the top of my head, sorry!

To preface this, many of the sexual unions Zeus and other gods engage in can be referred to as gamos/gamoi, a term that is often translated as marriage but doesn't necessarily imply the formality of an official marital union (Apollo's rape of Creusa in Euripides' Ion is called gamos for instance), just as the verb gamēo can mean to marry or simply to have sex with. So I'm limiting this to women who I know for sure are called "wife of Zeus" sometimes rather than including all the ones he is said to have performed a gamos with.

The only one who bears this title consistently and frequently is Hera, but there are some others who are occasionally described as his wives in some sources: Leto (Homer, Iliad 21.498-9, Homer, Odyssey 11.580, Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthomerica 11.21); Metis (Hesiod, Theogony 886); Themis (Pindar, fragment 30, Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 6.1.9 - not explicitly called wife here but he is said to have married her and I'm including it for the sake of thoroughness since she is called his wife elsewhere); Io (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 834); Demeter (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 6.1.9 - again not actually called a wife, but she is one of 3 women he marries in this account, the other two being Hera and Themis who are explicitly called his wives elsewhere); Semele (Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.31.2); Europa (Moschos, Europa and the Bull 165 - the word used here is νύμφη, "bride").

Mentioning this separately because it is quite anomalous, but the earliest description of a formal wedding among the gods (including wedding preparations, gifts and even a marriage proposal) is provided by Pherecydes of Syros and takes place between Zas/Zeus and Chthonie/Ge. The myth also serves as an etiology for the anakalypteria, the unveiling of the bride.

Again, this is by no means a complete overview. Likely there are other women called wife of Zeus in ancient literature, and, except for Chthonie, Themis and Metis, I don't claim to have mentioned all the sources in which these women are called this; there could be others that don't come to mind right now.

Strange that the idea of Artemis helping her mother give birth to Apollo is mentioned, like, one time in all extant Greek mythology and somehow came to be considered the standard version of the tale.

How should I know? 😭 I don't even see how one would go about quantifying such a thing. Which version of Zeus are we talking about? Does he actually love either of them? How do we decide that? On what basis do we assume which one he prefers? What kind of love are we talking about?

Personally I would argue he doesn't, though he might very well find Leto a more agreeable person in general. In Hesiod's Theogony he chose to marry Hera even though Leto had already hgiven him the most splendid offspring, "lovely children above all the celestials.". In the short but representative list of women and goddesses desired by Zeus (Ixion's wife, Danae, the daughter of Phoinix, Semele, Alkmene, Demeter, Leto, Hera) that he himself provides in Iliad 14, Leto is quite high up, second only to Hera, but she is still second to her. And then there is the fact that Zeus did nothing to punish Hera for her mistreatment of Leto in any source, and usually he does either nothing or very little to prevent Leto's suffering at Hera's hands.

I get what you mean; I can think of a few instances of that sort. According to a fragment attributed to Hesiod (listed as Fr. 91 here) and also mentioned in Pseudo-Apollodoros' Library 3.10.4, Zeus apparently intended to throw Apollo into Tartaros for killing the Kyklopes but Leto intervened on his behalf and he was made to serve a mortal instead. Then, according to Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica 4.60, Latona, Diana and Apollo convinced Jupiter to put an end to Prometheus' punishment. Also in one account Orion was placed among the stars by Zeus at the request of Artemis and Leto.

That said, I don't believe we can separate these interventions of Leto from her role as Artemis and Apollo's mother, both because giving birth to not one but two of the greatest gods in the pantheon is a big deal, but also because I can't think of a single interaction between Leto and Zeus that does not involve or concern, in one way or another, one or both of their children. She certainly has a high standing on Olympos (which is why I always side-eye those retellings in which she is exiled from among the gods and forbidden from interacting with her children and what not), as I've pointed out previously she is probably the one goddess who is most frequently called the wife of Zeus in ancient Greek literature after Hera (a very distant second though), and from what we get to see her relationship with Zeus is quite harmonious. The scene in Homeric Hymn 3 to Apollo where she disarms her son who had just terrified all the gods and puts his bow away while Zeus gladly welcomes him is very meaningful, I think, especially when you consider the rumors that circulated before Apollo's birth and the reason why Leto struggled so much to find a place willing to allow her to give birth: "They say that Apollon will be haughty and greatly lord it over the immortal gods and the mortal men of the barley-bearing earth." (Homeric Hymn to Apollo 66-9). So even though all the lands were too frightened to allow Apollo to be born, even though the gods themselves tremble and jump from their seats at his entrance on Olympos, even though there are rumors that he will be a less than pleasant character (who might even pose a danger to his father's rule?), here the father does not suppress his son and the mother does not encourage him to turn against his father.

People will be like "In precisely one (1) source Zeus had Apollo and Artemis before he married Hera, which means that she persecuted Leto for no reason at all (even though that one source actually says nothing about any persecution of Leto and the accounts that do mention Hera's anger also make it clear that she was already involved with Zeus during Leto's pregnancy and even had grown children with him)" and expect to be taken seriously, smh. It's not like Hera actually ignores 90% of the women Zeus has children with during their marriage; no, she is a big meanie that would punish someone for sleeping with her brother before he even became her husband.

Imagine giving birth on an island that used to be your sister who sort of commited suicide in order to avoid being raped by the same god whose children you're carrying. Yikes.

„The story used to explain the epithet of Apollo Lykegenes is that Leto came to Delos in the form of a wolf (lykos) to escape Hera, but an aition for Lycia also connects her with wolves. In this story, which perhaps makes more explicit certain aspects of the other, she wishes, still in exile, to wash her new-born babies, but is turned away from the water by some cowherds; she is received by wolves and guided to the streams of Xanthus. These stories are explicit aitia, and up to a point it would be true to say Leto becomes a wolf because she is mother of Apollo Lykegenes. However, in so far as we have not merely an explanation but also a story, the myth requires a different approach. In fact, It shares some of the themes of the stories we have been considering. Leto is different from the other heroines in that her transformation is a self-willed temporary disguise, but it is still connected with a journey into the wilds and with pregnancy. The wolf is clearly not a sexually inviting animal. Leto is closer to Callisto than to Io in this respect, and also in the way that she bears her children in homeless exile. The theme of pollution emerges most strongly in the Lycia aition, where being received by wolves is connected with her unclean state after giving birth and where, like Callisto, she is not allowed to share the communal water; but her impurity is perhaps also behind the refusal, in the story, of any land except the floating island of Delos to allow her to bring forth her child.

In the ancient world the wolf was not merely, like the lion or bear, a symbol of animal savagery, but more particularly a symbol of the outcast, fugitive, or outsider. In early Hittite laws we find: 'Thou art become a wolf' (as a penalty for murder). In Greece we have the Arcadian wolf-men who are exiled after a cannibal feast; here too the wolf has an almost metaphorical sense. Very close to the Leto story is that of Athamas who, banished after killing his sons, is told to found a new city in a place where he is entertained by wolves. Danaos is identified with a wolf, as an outsider, in an omen to the people of Argos. (This is an aition for the worship of Apollo Lykeios, but it shows that such an aition might be expected to play upon the general character of the wolf.) In our story the connection of the wolf with the social outcast fits in with the theme of the exile and isolation of Leto, with Apollo's links with Delos, a barren and remote island, and with the curiously ambiguous mythological conception of Apollo himself: on the one hand he is Zeus' right-hand man, the guardian of Olympic order, while on the other he goes through a series of punishments and exiles.”

- Metamorphosis in Greek Myths by Paul M. C. Forbes Irving