Part 1 of The company Hekate keeps
A popular image of Hekate is that of her standing at a crossroads, carrying torches, solitary and enigmatic. Ancient sources, however, place her alongside gods, mortals, and spirits. This three-part series explores the company she keeps and what it reveals about her character, her powers, and how her identity changed as different communities, poets, philosophers, and magicians came to know her.
Hekate has parents, grandparents, and cousins. Some accounts even say she has husbands and children. Others accompany her: the restless dead, torch-bearing nymphs, and the dogs whose barking announces her presence.
Exploring these relationships can broaden our understanding of Hekate’s character, powers, and place in the Greek religious imagination. It also reveals how her identity developed over time, as different communities, poets, philosophers, and magicians understood her in different ways. This three-part series follows her through that company: Part 1 begins with her family, Part 2 follows her fellow travellers, and Part 3 follows her lovers, children, and stranger company.
This first part begins at home.
Perses and Asteria
Our earliest account of Hekate’s parentage comes from the Theogony of Hesiod, the Boeotian poet whose genealogy of the gods became the standard reference for later Greeks. Composed in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, it names her parents as Perses and Asteria, both from the older generation of pre-Olympian deities known as Titans. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, probably composed in the seventh or sixth century BCE, also calls her the daughter of Perses.
Perses was the son of the Titans Krios and Eurybia. His name is sometimes connected with the Greek verb perthō, “to destroy”, but surviving myth says little about him. Hesiod gives him a single line, describing him as outstanding among all for his wisdom.
Her mother, Asteria, was the daughter of the Titans Koios and Phoebe. Phoebe’s name means “bright”, and in the Eumenides of the Athenian tragedian Aeschylus, she is one of the goddesses who held the Delphic oracle before Apollo. Asteria’s name means “starry”, and her ancestry places Hekate within a divine family associated with the heavens and with prophecy.
Asteria’s sister was Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, which makes those two Olympians Hekate’s first cousins. The sisters are also linked by place. In Bibliotheca 1.4.1, a passage from the handbook of Greek myth compiled in the first or second century CE by an author conventionally called Pseudo-Apollodorus, Asteria turns herself into a quail to escape Zeus and plunges into the sea. The place named after her later becomes Delos, where Leto gives birth to her twins.
Other parents
Not every ancient source followed Hesiod. The Hellenistic poet and scholar Callimachus of Cyrene (c. 310–240 BCE) names Zeus and Demeter as Hekate’s parents. The work is lost, but an ancient commentary on the second Idyll of Theocritus, the third-century BCE poet who pioneered pastoral poetry, preserves the account. It says Zeus lay with Demeter and fathered Hekate, a goddess who surpassed the other gods in strength and stature, and later sent her beneath the earth to search for Persephone. Rudolf Pfeiffer, the twentieth-century German classicist whose edition of Callimachus remains the standard, accepted the genealogy as genuinely Callimachean and thought the underworld search probably was as well. The Orphic poems also present Zeus and Demeter as her parents. An ancient commentary on Apollonius quotes an Orphic line in which Demeter bears Hekate “of a noble father”, and Otto Kern, the German scholar who edited the Orphic fragments, thought Callimachus likely drew on these poems.
The commentary on Theocritus also preserves a very different story from Sophron, a fifth-century BCE Syracusan writer of dramatic mimes that now survive only in fragments. Theocritus is said to have modelled his second Idyll on one of them. In Sophron’s account, Hera lay with Zeus and bore a daughter named Angelos, whom Zeus gave to the Nymphs to raise. Once grown, Angelos stole the perfumed ointment Hera used on her face and gave it to Europa. Fleeing Hera’s anger, she hid first in the house of a woman who had just given birth and then among men carrying a corpse. Both were sources of ritual pollution, so Hera gave up the chase, and Zeus ordered the Kabeiroi, gods of the Samothracian mysteries, to purify Angelos in the Acherusian lake of the underworld. The commentator explains that this is why the goddess was allotted to the dead, and identifies Angelos with chthonic Hekate. “Chthonic” comes from chthōn, “earth”, and describes the powers of the earth and the underworld beneath it.
A third genealogy, attributed to the legendary poet Musaeus, makes Hekate the daughter of Zeus and Asteria. It survives in the ancient commentary on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the third-century BCE epic of Jason’s voyage for the Golden Fleece.
Zeus: benefactor and civic partner
Zeus holds an unusual place in Hekate’s story. He is her benefactor in Hesiod, her father in several later traditions, and, in parts of Karia, her partner in civic cult.
Zeus in the Theogony
Hesiod devotes around forty lines to Hekate, a passage so long and enthusiastic that it reads almost like a hymn set inside the poem. He says Zeus honoured her above all others, giving her a share of the earth, the sea, and the starry heavens. She keeps every privilege she held under the Titans, and Zeus also makes her a nurturer of the young.
Hesiod never says why Zeus favours her, but the surrounding passage supplies a context. Just before turning to Hekate, he says that Zeus, preparing for war against the Titans, promised to keep the honours of any deity who had held them under Kronos, and that Styx was the first to bring her children to his side. In this world, a deity won Zeus’s favour with the help of family by bringing kin to fight on his side. Hesiod stresses twice that Hekate was her mother’s only child. She had no brothers to defend her rights and no children to offer, so she owes whatever she keeps entirely to Zeus’s goodwill. Hekate belongs to this new order: a Titan’s daughter whose powers Zeus confirms rather than strips away. The classicist Jenny Strauss Clay argues that Hekate’s reach across every realm makes her an intermediary between gods and mortals, and thus a figure who embodies how Zeus distributes honour in his new world.
Later tradition gave Hekate a more active role at Zeus’s side. In Bibliotheca 1.6.2, she fights for the Olympians in their war against the Giants and kills the giant Klytios with her torches. At Lagina in Karia, the sculpted frieze of her temple shows her at Zeus’s birth, handing Kronos the stone he swallows in place of his son. The British archaeologist Charles Newton, who described the frieze after visiting the site in the 1850s, even suggested that another slab showed Hekate’s own birth, to Zeus and either Hera or Demeter.
Hekate and Zeus as civic patrons
At Stratonikeia, a Hellenistic city in Karia (modern southwestern Türkiye), Hekate and Zeus were the principal patrons. Hekate was worshipped at her sanctuary at Lagina, linked to the city by a sacred way, and Zeus Panamaros at his sanctuary at Panamara. Both sites lay outside the urban centre and became major settings for public religious and political life. As the art historian Amanda Herring has shown, Lagina is unique. It is the only place where Hekate received a state-sponsored cult at a monumental temple, and in every surviving image from the sanctuary she appears with a single body, never in the triple form common elsewhere.
As the archaeologist Christina Williamson has shown, these cults shaped Stratonikeia’s civic identity in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. As the city extended its authority over surrounding communities, shared worship of Hekate and Zeus helped bind them to it. The priesthoods were prestigious civic offices, and festivals and processions brought the communities together in public worship.
By the Roman period, the city’s council house, the bouleuterion, also served as the urban sanctuary of the two gods. A decree inscribed there appointed a choir of thirty boys from leading families to sing a hymn to Zeus and Hekate in the building every day, and once a year at Lagina. The gods were honoured inside the very building where the city governed itself.
Lagina also became a stage for diplomacy. Stratonikeia’s changing relationships with Rhodes and, later, Rome shaped the public expression of Hekate’s cult. The Hekatesia-Romaia festival celebrated the city’s alliance with Rome, and when the Roman renegade Labienus sacked the sanctuary in 40 BCE, Augustus helped pay for its restoration. At Stratonikeia, Hekate protected the city, received public honours, and took part in the institutions through which it expressed its political identity.
The double throne on Chalke
Another example of their association survives on Chalke (modern Halki), a small island near Rhodes. On the slopes below its acropolis, two seats carved side by side into a boulder bear inscriptions naming Zeus and Hekate. The German epigrapher Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen recorded them in the late nineteenth century, and the monument is often described as a double throne.
Scholars usually date the inscriptions to the Hellenistic period, and nothing else at the site indicates how the seats were used. They may have marked the invisible presence of the two gods, or people may have occupied them during ceremonies.
In Greek religion, an empty throne could signal a deity’s presence without a statue. Scholars discuss such cases under the heading of aniconism, the representation or worship of gods through forms other than human-shaped images. The classical art historian Milette Gaifman points out that the Chalke seats complicate the category: they are human-scale and shaped like mortal thrones, so they still imagine their divine occupants in human form. Whatever their use, the seats place Zeus and Hekate side by side.
Family ties
Hekate’s family tree is less settled than it first appears. Hesiod makes her the only child of two Titans, a goddess who keeps her ancient privileges and gains new honours under Zeus. Callimachus, Sophron, and Musaeus give her other parents, and nearly all of them make Zeus her father. Whichever account we follow, Zeus is never far from her side: the king who honours her in Hesiod, the father of later traditions, and the partner who shared her council house at Stratonikeia and sat beside her on Chalke. Hesiod describes their bond in terms of divine honours and cosmic authority, and these communities show that it also lived in local practice.
Family is only the beginning. In Part 2, we follow Hekate beyond her kin to her fellow travellers: Persephone and Demeter, Hermes, and the goddesses Artemis and Selene, with whom her identity came to merge.
Sources and further reading
Ancient sources
- Aeschylus, Eumenides
- Apollodorus, Bibliotheca
- Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica
- Callimachus, fragments
- Hesiod, Theogony
- Homeric Hymn to Demeter
- Theocritus, Idylls
Modern works
- Bernini, Julie, and Joy Rivault. 2020. “Le bouleutèrion de Stratonicée, réflexions sur les fonctions de l’édifice à l’époque impériale.” Revue des Études Anciennes 122 (1): 137–64.
- Clay, Jenny Strauss. 1984. “The Hecate of the Theogony.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 25: 27–38.
- Gaifman, Milette. 2012. Aniconism in Greek Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Gaifman, Milette. 2017. “Aniconism: Definitions, Examples and Comparative Perspectives.” Religion 47 (3): 335–52.
- Herring, Amanda. 2022. “Hekate of Lagina: A Goddess Performing Her Civic Duty.” Anatolian Studies 72: 141–65.
- Kern, Otto, ed. 1922. Orphicorum Fragmenta. Berlin: Weidmann.
- Newton, Charles Thomas. 1862–63. A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus and Branchidae. London: Day & Son.
- Pfeiffer, Rudolf, ed. 1949. Callimachus. Vol. 1, Fragmenta. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Wendel, Carl, ed. 1914. Scholia in Theocritum vetera. Leipzig: Teubner.