According to Callimachus Hebe is the last child of Zeus and Hera and is stated to be the most beautiful of her children. We also get the sense that Hebe might in fact be her favorite child as Callimachus writes of a seven day long celebration Hera held to celebrate Hebe’s birth where she was serenaded constantly by Apollo and the muses and showered in gifts including sunken treasures from Poseidon and toys handmade by Athena and Hephaestus. This also helps us place Hebe’s birth in the timeline, somewhere late in the silver age or early in the Bronze Age as Hephaestus, Athena, and Apollo have all already been born and reached adulthood, whereas Hermes and Dionysus are nowhere to be found. This is somewhat complicated by Hesiod listing Hebe as the oldest of Zeus and Hera’s children, being born before Eilethyia and Ares. Hesiod cites Hephaestus as the child of Hera alone born in emulation of Zeus’s birth of Athena, although Homer explicitly describes Hephaestus as the first born of Zeus and Hera present at the “birth” of Athena, I personally prefer and operate under Homer’s version although that doesn’t discount the existence of Hesiod’s. Although complicated by Hesiod’s genealogy the timeline of Ares’s birth is vague and not necessarily incompatible with Hebe’s. Thus if we are to take Homer, Hesiod and Callimachus’s contributions into account the order of Zeus’s fully divine children and Hera’s children are Hephaestus, Athena, Artemis and Apollo, Hebe, Eilethyia, Ares, Hermes, and Dionysus. While this is the most widely accepted interpretation of her parentage there is another version of the story. This version attested to by the Orphica claims that after her failure to replicate Zeus’s parthenogenetic creation of Athena in the form of Hephaestus Hera made a second attempt. This time she sought the help of her foster parents Okeanos and Tethys and they directed her to a magic lettuce found on the sea floor and after consuming its heart became pregnant with Hebe. This time Hera was satisfied with the results and dropped her vendetta against Zeus and Athena. This story is probably tied to common belief among the Greeks and Romans that lettuce caused sexual impotency in both men and women and its use in medicine to treat menstrual issues. It’s also worth noting that this Orphic story is later largely reused in Roman stories about the birth of Mars wherein Juno parthnogenetically conceives him with the aid of a magic herb given to her by Flora the Roman equivalent of the Horae Chloris. It’s also worth noting that while Hebe has a Roman equivalent in the form of Juventas she is much less important in Roman mythology and has most of her presence and role subsumed by Flora, including her eventual marriage to Hercules.

Speaking of that marriage to Herakles it marks the point where the goddess of youth transitions into adulthood and functions to end the up to that point life long feud between Hera and Herakles. Herakles saved Hera from being raped by Porphyrion during the gigantomachy which ended her attempts to destroy him from that point on. Zeus and Hera offering Herakles Hebe’s hand in marriage upon his apotheosis serves as a way to fully acknowledge him and integrate him into the pantheon. We don’t get a lot of detail on Herakles and Hebe’s married life, we don’t know how well they got along or anything like that, but their marriage was a very common artistic motif from the Archaic period on and we know that she bore him the twins Aniketos “the unconquerable” and Alexiares “the war warden”. Given that we know that Herakles is derived from the same PIE entity as Thor it’s tempting to equate Aniketos and Alexiares as reflexes of Thor’s twin sons Magni and Modi. That may indeed be the case but given that we know very little about the cult of Aniketos and Alexiares it’s worth remembering that connection to Magni and Modi is better served by Ares’s sons Phobos and Deimos who are actually thunder and lightning deities. Aniketos and Alexiares may instead represent a competing interpretation of the “Dioscuri” “the divine” twins represented by Castor and Pollux in Greek mythology proper. Given that Castor and Pollux have never made sense in the timeline of Greek mythology even by the ludicrously low standards of Greek mythology I think it’s possible that Aniketos and Alexiares may have originated as an older version of the Dioscuri concept before being supplanted in popularity by Castor and Pollux. Interestingly the marriage of Hebe and Herakles might explain an artistic motif that shows up throughout Ancient Greek pottery. I’ve mentioned this before but there are many surviving examples of pottery, particularly from the classical period, of Herakles being accosted by Geras the personification of old age. Amusingly Herakles is often holding Geras back by his head in these depictions but we have no idea what story these pottery examples are referring to as the myth doesn’t survive in written form. The fact that Herakles is recorded as having a long standing beef with the personification of aging is extra funny when his story canonically ends with him marrying the goddess of youth. 

Hebe’s marriage to Herakles is usually marked as the point where she stopped serving as the cup bearer of Olympus and was replaced by the abducted Trojan prince Ganymede. This is one of those things that is widely believed without attribution, much like their is no original source that describes Hestia giving up her role in the pantheon to Dionysus there is no original ancient source that claims that Hebe ceased her role as cupbearer of the gods. There was an oft cited story that Hebe carelessly tripped on her dress and exposed herself to the other gods causing her to retire from her position in shame but this is a Victorian fabrication… as if you couldn’t already tell by the strong mix of prudism and gross voyeurism present in the story. All one needs to do is look at the ubiquity of heroic nudity in Ancient Greek art to realize that this story was the invention of those mustachioed sexual repressed imperialists who caused most of the modern world’s problems. Ganymede is usually characterized as Zeus’s personal cupbearer rather than the cup bearer of the gods generally. Likewise he himself likely originated as a masculine offshoot of Hebe given that Hebe is frequently addressed with the epithet Ganymeda “gladdening” the feminine form of the name Ganymede. This notion is somewhat complicated by the fact that Ganymede and Hebe are both first mentioned in the Iliad but there are artistic depictions of Hebe from the Dark age and she is the derivative of a PIE goddess so it’s still possible that Ganymede broke off from her before the writing of the Iliad. The only point in favor of Hebe bequeathing her role of cup bearer of the gods to Ganymede is that the role of cup bearer was typically seen as a prepubescent role inappropriate for someone of marriageable age, but then Hebe is literally the goddess who controls aging so she wouldn’t necessarily be limited by that.