NEMESIS

I. Names

The name Nemesis is first referenced in both of Hesiod's works, the Theogony and the Works and Days. The word relates to distribution, indignation and retribution even before this context, but this is the first instance of divine personification; her name comes from the verb νέμειν or to distribute.^{1, 2, 3}

In Latin, she clearly appears as her alternate name Rhamnusia virgo in Catullus' works of the first century BCE. Her first physical attestation as Nemesis is on a coin of Nero's reign from Smyrna, dating 68–69 AD. She may have appeared earlier in Hyginus' Fabulae, but the dating of that work is not securely known and can only be inferred from linguistic context.^{4, 5, 6}

Sources: Hesiod, Theogony; Hesiod, Works and Days; Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (1940); Catullus, The Poems of Catullus; Burnett, Amandry, and Ripollès, Roman Provincial Coinage (1992); Smith and Trzaskoma, Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae (2007).^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}

II. Nemesis

Nemesis is the punishing and chthonic aspect of violating Maat. The reference to the dual goddess in many Greek and Roman contexts is a direct relation to Egyptian themes; it is constantly impressed that Nemesis is part of a duo, and sometimes she is referred to in the plural as Nemeseis. Historians have long struggled to understand which other Goddess is being referenced, leading them to ask: "which Nemesis is the other?" To answer this question, historians have equated her twin with particular Goddesses in areas of symbolic overlap and proximity.⁷

Orphic Hymn 61¹¹

Nemesis, I call on you, goddess, greatest queen, all-seeing, who look upon the life of mortals’many races. Eternal, all-holy, alone rejoicing in the righteous, you change your much-varying ever-shifting word, you whom all mortals fear, placing your yoke upon their necks. For you care about all men’s thoughts, nor does the soul which is over-proud in words (ψυχὴ ὑπερϕρονέουσα λόγων), without discretion, escape you. You see all and hear all, and all do you arbitrate. In you reside the judgements (δίκαι) of mortals, highest deity. Come, blessed one, pure one, always helpful to initiates. Grant them to have good understanding, putting an end to hateful, unhallowed, altogether arrogant and fickle thoughts (πανεχθεῖς γνώμας οὐχ ὁσιας, πανυπέρϕρονας, ἀλλοπροσάλλας).

AP 12.193, Epigram, Strato of Sardis¹²

You don’t take any notice of what the Nemeseis of Smyrna tell you, Artemidoros: “Nothing beyond measure.” But, always playing a part, you talk so arrogantly and savagely and as is not even becoming in a comic actor. You will remember this, haughty boy; you too will love and play the part of the “Locked-Out Lady”.

Her mythological role is limited. Ovid shows her as the destroyer of Narcissus whose vain cruelty either prompts him to spurn the nymph Echo or leads his beloved to commit suicide. The Cypria, a prelude work to the Iliad by Stasinus of Cyprus, gives Nemesis as the mother of Helen. One explanation for her rage is that Zeus pursued her relentlessly, where she transformed into a goose to escape him, but he managed to overcome her in the form of a swan. The egg was then given to Leda, the conventional mother of Helen, Klytemnestra and the Dioskouroi, and from it came Helen alone, the passive agent of the Iliad's chaos.^{13, 14}

III. Epithets

Sources: Hornum, Nemesis, the Roman State, and the Games (1993); Pausanias, Description of Greece; Binder, The Monuments and Sites of Athens (2001); Tataki, “Nemesis, Nemeseis, and the Gladiatorial Games at Smyrna” (2009); Strabo, Geography.^{7, 15, 16, 17, 18}

IV. Temples

Her temple complexes were called Nemeseaions, and they were seemingly erected and restored for particular reasons.

Smyrna

The temple of Nemesis at Smyrna was unusual as the city worshipped the two Nemeseis openly, not only one Nemesis. The historian Pausanias had this to say of the foundation legend: Alexander, hunting on Mount Pagos, came to a sanctuary of the Nemeseis with a spring and a plane-tree before it. Sleeping there, he saw the Nemeseis in a dream, and they commanded him to found a new city and move the Smyrnaeans from the old city into it. The Smyrnaeans then consulted Apollo at Claros, received an approving oracle, and migrated willingly. Pausanias adds that they believed in two Nemeseis, whose mother was Night, unlike the Athenians, who made the mother of the Rhamnousian Nemesis Okeanos although this primordial form is linked to Hesiod too. The temple thereafter was essentially central to Smyrna’s civic identity: the goddesses were divine founders of the renewed city.^{15, 19}

The temple’s exact location is debated as no excavated temple can be securely identified with it. Modern study notes that the Smyrnaean temples of the Nemeseis and Tyche are known from written and numismatic evidence, not standing architecture; Roman imperial coins show the temple of the Nemeseis as a tetrastyle building with the two goddesses inside, but whether that coin image reproduces the real temple is uncertain. Scholars have placed it either on Mount Pagos, following the foundation story, or near the agora, because Pausanias mentions the spring and plane-tree and because some inscriptions and topographic arguments point toward the southern side of the agora or its surrounding area. The safest formulation is therefore that Smyrna had a famous sanctuary/temple of the Nemeseis, probably tied in memory to Pagos and in civic life to the city-centre, but its precise architectural remains have not been recovered.²⁰

In Smyrnaean society, the Nemeseis functioned as civic protectors, symbols of the refounded city, also as guardians of justice, fortune, and imperial public order. Their cult was close to Tyche, and modern scholarship stresses that both Tyche and the Nemeseis represented Smyrna in antiquity, though the Nemeseis were more deeply tied to the city’s Hellenistic foundation legend. By the Roman imperial period the cult also seems to have interacted with imperial religion. A third-century inscription dated to 211/212 CE records an enlargement connected with the temple of the Nemeseis, Caracalla’s grant of land, and the philosopher Papinius’ dedication of an adjoining house to the goddesses; the same study argues that this strongly associates the temple with the imperial cult. The Martyrdom of Pionius likewise places Christian refusal in front of the altar of the temple of Nemesis, showing that sacrifices there were still part of Smyrna’s public religious life under Decius in 250 CE. The Nemeseis are interpreted to have a kindly and brutal aspect each, much like the dual Weighing of the Heart forms of Maat.^{20, 21, 22}

Rhamnous

Rhamnous was a sanctuary, deme and fort northeast of Athens that became so synonymous with the goddess that she is most often referred to as Rhamnousia in texts. Pausanias says that Nemesis of Rhamnous was the most relentless goddess against men of violence, and he connected her anger with the Persians who landed at Marathon during the invasion of Greece explicitly. The famous story iterated is that the Persians had brought a block of Parian marble to make a trophy after their expected victory; after their defeat, Phidias, according to Pausanias’ version, used that very marble to make the statue of Nemesis. The Rhamnous sanctuary was a place where Nemesis rather than being “revenge” in the abstract was a goddess who punished the highest imperial hubris of Darius and Xerxes and turned the Persian intended victory-monument into her own cult-image.^{15, 23}

The sanctuary itself contained two closely placed temples. The smaller earlier temple, usually associated with Themis and Nemesis, was a modest poros structure, while the larger Classical temple of Nemesis was a marble Doric temple probably built or completed in the later fifth century BCE, around 430–420 BCE. The temple was a peripteral hexastyle, 71 feet (22 m) long and 33 feet (10 m) broad, with 12 columns on the side, and with a pronaos, cella, and posticum in the usual manner. The larger temple housed the celebrated cult-statue of colossal stature, now usually attributed not to Pheidias himself but to Agorakritos of Paros, Pheidias’ pupil; fragments of the statue and its sculptured base have been recovered, and the base seems to have shown a family grouping connected with Helen, Leda and the Dioskouroi, a frame that tied Nemesis into the story of divine justice and the consequences of beauty, desire and violence. Nemesis' beautiful statue within the temple was very famous, adorned with stags and miniature versions of Nike:^{15, 24, 25}

"Of this marble Pheidias made a statue of Nemesis, and on the head of the goddess is a crown with deer and small images of Victory. In her left hand she holds an apple branch, in her right hand a cup on which are wrought Aethiopians. [...] Neither this nor any other ancient statue of Nemesis has wings, for not even the holiest xoana of the Smyrnaeans have them"
Pausanias, Description of Greece¹⁵

It is known Alexander erected several Nemeseaions during his conquests, and her temple at Alexandria was dated prior to the Roman conquest, as a papyrus from Memphis attests. One example of how her worship could be restructured in response to shifting circumstances was in Alexandria after the chaos of a Hebrew revolt in the city with endless bloodshed during the Kitos War, after which the emperor Trajan rebuilt the complex rather pointedly to proclaim victory over the rebels. Another convention originating in Hellenistic Egypt, but becoming a more prevalent imagery during the Trajanic age, is the image of Nemesis trampling a prone figure, likely relating to crushing of that kind of anti-theist iniquity.⁷

V. Roman Uses

In Rome, a state inclined to war, Nemesis came to be associated with the Roman machinery of state on a bellicose footing. Thanks to Julius Caesar at least nominally making her his patron deity to allegorically insist that Pompey had started the civil war rupturing the Republic, the Roman emperors had a temenos of Nemesis referenced on coins. Pliny the Elder mentions that a statue of Nemesis existed on the foundational Capitoline Hill. A massive amount of cameos and coins featuring her proliferated during the Late Republic and early imperial period. Nemesis was considered a patroness of theaters and other grounds of entertainment in a Roman context. She increasingly became associated with the funerary games and the gladiatorial games with the expansion of the Roman state, likely in regard to contests held between those who betrayed Rome, but this was an aspect that was treated with some ambivalence and horror from Greeks, not being found in their own traditions of the agon (although the only inscription from a Priest of Nemesis in a theatrical and arena context does exist in Roman-period Athens, a place where gladiatorial and bloody combat was seemingly totally banned, which is rather telling).^{7, 27}

In this context, Nemesis was associated with training of the body and soul, but this contention in the arena often took on vulgar and impious associations among the gladiator milieu that the High Priest of Apollo Plutarch unilaterally condemned.²⁸

She of the Drill Ground

Among the Greeks, the main militaristic context of Nemesis is her role in punishing Persian hubris during the invasion of Greece. Rhamnous itself was a frontier fort and had large garrisons of soldiers, bestowing to us a large amount of military inscriptions, possibly showing a connection in a more vague sense.^{26, 29, 30}

Nemesis had a presence in the Roman military as soldiers lived close to the same forces she governed: danger, discipline, revenge, punishment, victory and chance, sometimes dancing perilously on karmic knife edges. Her cult appears especially in military amphitheatre contexts, where soldiers, gladiators, guards, veterans, and military communities dedicated altars or reliefs to her. At Deva (modern Chester in England), a red sandstone altar to Nemesis was found in the legionary amphitheatre, in a small room behind the arena wall which was probably a shrine of Nemesis; the find-spot itself shows how naturally her cult belonged beside the spectacle and military entertainment. At Carnuntum, beside the legionary amphitheatre, there was also a shrine of Nemesis, and the dedications there are heavily connected with the military community, especially men of Legio XIV Gemina. In the eastern and Danubian provinces, the pattern is similar. At Cabyle, a Roman military camp in Thrace, fragments of an inscribed relief show Nemesis’ cult inside or beside a military setting, while at Chersonesos a beneficiarius of the Eleventh Claudian legion dedicated to “Nemesis the Protector” for safety.^{31, 32, 33, 34}

VI. Rod and Wheel

Nemesis is depicted in statuary as an austere diadem-wearing woman of equilibrium with a measuring rod, bridle or outstretched palm, which are subtle symbols of her intent to measure humanity's commitment to divine laws. The bridle was said to be a yoke put on humanity until they advanced. She is also frequently depicted near a wheel emblazoned with a gryphon, a continual theme in her recovered symbolic language, relating in Michael Hornum's analysis of mythology to correctives in erotic discipline. She is not represented as a warrior like Athena or Dike; her posture and set of symbols are subtle ones like those of Maat. In vases, she is represented with Tyche (Fate) as a duo. On coinage from the Classical period onwards but intensifying with the Roman imperial period, she is shown with wings (in total contradiction to Pausanias' statement that a statue of Nemesis will never have them), a measuring rod and a branch. The gryphon with the wheel often serves as her shorthand, and sometimes she is shown in a dualistic manner with the Goddess of Peace, Pax. The coin of Geta shows her link to Maat as she wields a pair of scales.^{7, 35, 36, 37}