7. Labor Without End for Zeus’ Former Mistress
To be Zeus’ mistress was a tough row to hoe. The chief Olympian god’s relentless pursuit, persistence, rough wooing, and refusal to take “no” for an answer, was bad enough. Worse for those who gave in to Zeus, or were forcibly taken by him, was that they then had to deal with his insanely jealous wife, Hera, and her crazy punishments. Punishments not of her philandering husband, but of his victims. Leto was Zeus’ first mistress, and became the first to fall victim both to the chief god, who slaked his lust and abandoned her when she got pregnant, and then to the bonkers wrath of his wife.
To exacerbate the unfairness of it all, Leto had been Zeus’ mistress before he married Hera. As such, the chief god had not even been cheating on his wife at the time. In Greek mythology, Leto was a Titan goddess whose beauty captivated Zeus, and she became his first and favorite lover. However, after Zeus impregnated Leto with twins, he abandoned her in order to marry his sister, Hera. That was not even close to the worse that happened to poor Leto.