Nemesis, the goddess of limits

In Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (1975), Ivan Illich borrowed the name of a Greek goddess for what happens when modern institutionalized technology (or technologized institutions) will not accept any limits. My earlier post, “Why more makes less,” explains how he used Nemesis to name iatrogenesis — illness and death caused by medicine itself.

Writers and artists have pictured Nemesis for more than two thousand years. Read historically, these images and the uses of her name show how Western thinking about limits has changed. Over time she moves from a moral force and a goddess, to a plot device, and finally to a faceless, mysterious enemy who may be us.

A moral force and a goddess

The name Nemesis comes from the Greek verb némō, to deal out or distribute. Nemesis gives each their due. The Oxford Classical Dictionary calls her both a goddess and an abstract concept, often a personified moral agent.

In Hesiod’s Theogony she is a daughter of Night, born among Death, Sleep, Strife, and the Fates. Later writers made her a daughter of Ocean, of Zeus, or of Justice. Her work was to answer hybris (or hubris) — taking more than a mortal’s share, whether in pride, in fortune, or in cruelty to others. Hubris is the transgression; nemesis is the indignation or retribution that may follow.

The most revealing passage is in Hesiod’s Works and Days. In the age of iron, he says, Aidos (Shame or Reverence) and Nemesis will leave the earth and abandon humanity, and there will be no help against evil. Here Nemesis is not the destroyer of civilization. She is one of the restraints whose absence makes civilization impossible.

Nemesis also stands at the source of the Trojan story. In the lost epic Cypria and later retellings, Zeus pursues her through a series of animal forms and rapes her; from the egg she lays, Helen of Troy is born. One transgression sets off a long chain of consequences.

Five ages of Nemesis

In the earliest depictions of Nemesis, she has no weapons. Her now familiar attributes — the wheel, the griffin, the scales, the bridle, the measuring rod, the sword — were given to her later, mostly in the Roman period. Following their accumulation is a way of tracking what people wanted Nemesis to be.

Classical Greece

Her chief sanctuary was at Rhamnous, on the coast of Attica a few miles from Marathon. The travel writer Pausanias, who saw her statue there in the second century AD, repeats the local story: the Persians were so sure of victory in 490 BC that they brought a block of marble to carve a trophy, and after their defeat the Athenians made the block into a statue of Nemesis. Pausanias names the sculptor as Pheidias. Other ancient writers, and modern scholars, give it to his pupil Agorakritos of Paros, working about 430 BC.

Pausanias’ description is the important part. The goddess wore a crown decorated with deer and small figures of Victory. She held an apple branch in one hand and a cup in the other. She had no weapon. And he adds that neither this statue nor any other ancient statue of Nemesis had wings. Those came later.

Imperial Rome

By Roman times, Nemesis had changed. A marble statuette in the J. Paul Getty Museum, made about AD 150 and 46 centimetres high, gives her the face and hairstyle of the empress Faustina the Elder, wife of Antoninus Pius. Her left hand holds a wheel resting on a globe. She has wings and a defeated figure’s head under her right foot. The goddess who had answered the pride of an invading empire now wore the face of an empress.

Rome shaped Nemesis into the figure later European artists would inherit. As Michael Hornum has shown, she was enlisted in the service of the emperor and the state, and she presided over the gladiatorial games and beast hunts of the amphitheatre, where victory and death could turn on circumstances beyond anyone’s control.

Her attributes multiplied: the wheel for changing fortune, the bridle for restraint, the scales and measuring rod for proportion and judgment, the sword or scourge for punishment.

From the second century a griffin with its paw on a wheel often sits at her feet, and she was sometimes merged with Fortuna (Tyche), Diana (Artemis), or Victoria (Nike). The wings came late. Pausanias says that no ancient image of Nemesis had them, not even the most sacred wooden statues of the paired Nemeseis¹ at Smyrna. Later artists added wings, he explains, because they believed the goddess shows herself above all in love, and so gave her wings as they gave them to Eros.² By the second century she stands winged beside her wheel in a relief now in the Louvre.

None of this made Nemesis simply malevolent, and her cult stayed diverse. But punishment and the unpredictable allocation of fortune now stood beside the idea of equity.

Early Modern Europe

Dürer’s engraving is the best-known image of Nemesis — and the strangest. A heavy, winged, naked woman stands on a small sphere in the sky. She holds a goblet in one hand and a bridle in the other: reward and restraint. Far below, drawn in tiny detail, is a real place, the town of Klausen (Chiusa) in the South Tyrol, which Dürer had passed on his way to Venice. Karl Giehlow traced the figure to a Latin poem, Manto, by Angelo Poliziano, and Erwin Panofsky developed the reading. Dürer himself called the print “Die Nemesis” in the diary of his 1520–21 journey to the Netherlands; the title The Great Fortune came from later cataloguers. (Albertina Collections Online)

The print joins Nemesis to Fortuna, and the Nemesis-Fortuna mixes two different ideas: the correction of moral imbalance, which answers to what people do, and the instability of fortune, which does not. Yet one of its early readers saw something else. Giorgio Vasari took the figure for Temperance, and read the reins as the restraint people ought to exercise. Of all the pictures, this is the one that puts her over an ordinary town full of ordinary people.

Neoclassical and Romantic Nemesis

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Nemesis had become an allegorical agent of justice, and artists stressed her more intimidating attributes: wings, swords, punishment, and the certainty of judgment. Bertel Thorvaldsen’s neoclassical relief, Nemesis Attended by the Genii of Punishment and Reward, still divides her work between punishment and reward.

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime leaves the balance behind. In 1804 Nicolas Frochot, prefect of the Seine, commissioned it for the criminal court of the Palais de Justice in Paris. Two winged figures fly by moonlight after a murderer leaving his victim’s body. Themis, or Justice, carries the sword and scales; Nemesis, Divine Vengeance, carries the torch that exposes him. Nemesis has become a police power. She no longer keeps a measure. She chases a criminal, on the wall of a courtroom.

Rethel’s Nemesis, in the Hermitage, repeats the scene with one figure: an angel-like goddess with a sword in one hand and an hourglass in the other, above a fleeing murderer. Tattarescu’s Nemesis, Goddess of Revenge, in Bucharest, shows her alone in a cloud, with the hourglass and a handful of flames. The title says what she has become.

From goddess to adversary

In literature the goddess gradually leaves the stage, but her work remains in the plot. A character’s nemesis can be the downfall produced by their own excess, or another character who brings it about. Modern dictionaries preserve both senses, deserved and unavoidable punishment and a long-standing enemy; the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives them side by side. That double meaning is the residue of this history.

Professor Moriarty can be called Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, though Conan Doyle never makes him an agent of moral balance. In popular fiction the nemesis is an equal and opposite force, a recurring enemy who helps define the hero by opposing them with contrary, even antithetical attributes. The polarity can be reversed: a figure who once punished transgression becomes the transgressor the hero must defeat. As in pro wrestling, a face can become a heel.

What survives from the ancient goddess is less her justice than her inevitability. A modern nemesis returns, pursues, and seems impossible to escape. The word “nemesis” has moved from a rule that applies to everyone to a relationship between two people — from the keeper of a limit to the archenemy who will not go away.

Not every modern writer let the word shrink that far. Philip Roth’s Nemesis is set in Newark during the polio epidemic of 1944. Its nemesis is not a person but a disease, and its hero, the playground director Bucky Cantor, cannot accept that. He turns blind contagion into personal guilt and a quarrel with God, and the narrator, one of his playground boys who also caught polio, treats Bucky’s refusal to accept reality as hubris.

In a novel about an epidemic, the old question comes back in Illich’s terms: how can there be restitution for harm where there’s no culprit, just the craving to find one?³

What changed

Put the ancient and modern images side by side. At Rhamnous Nemesis stands still, without wings or weapon, holding a branch and a cup. She is a keeper of debts, set up by a city that had just watched a great power fail by overreaching and attempting to invade. By the nineteenth century, Nemesis flies, carries a torch beside Justice’s sword, and hunts one guilty man.

I think the older picture is nearer to what Illich meant, with one adjustment: he did not give up the idea of punishment. In “The Recovery of Health,” a late chapter of Medical Nemesis, he starts from Prometheus, who out of greed stepped past the limits of human beings, stole fire, and brought Nemesis on himself. Then he says the social nature of nemesis has changed. Industrial society has made desire itself a product, and hubris has spread to everyone. A hospital system, a road network, or a school system grows past the size at which it serves people, and the harm follows from the growth itself, with no single culprit to hunt. Nemesis, in his words, has become “structural and endemic.” Where classical Nemesis punished the rash abuse of privilege, the industrial kind is retribution for “dutiful participation” in the technical pursuit of dreams.

That is the goddess of the measuring rod and the bridle, who answers excess wherever it occurs, not the avenger who pursues one man. It is also the figure Vasari saw in Dürer’s print: restraint, held over a small town.

The scale Counterfoil uses is a measuring rod of a similar kind. See How we evaluate tools.

Notes

1. “Nemeseis” is the Greek plural form. ↩︎
2. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.33.7. Alexander’s dream of the two goddesses at Smyrna, which the city later put on its coins, is at 7.5.1–3. On the cult, its games, and its images, see Murat Kılıç, “The Cults of Nemeseis and Tyche at Smyrna,” Belleten 78, no. 283 (2014): 833–54; and Argyro B. Tataki, “Nemesis, Nemeseis, and the Gladiatorial Games at Smyrna,” Mnemosyne 62 (2009): 639–48. The Nemesis of love is the one in Ovid’s story of Narcissus (Metamorphoses 3), who answers the prayer of a spurned lover. ↩︎
3. Philip Roth, Nemesis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Two other modern uses fit the same arc: Agatha Christie’s Nemesis (London: Collins, 1971), in which Miss Marple works as an agent of justice under that name; and the “Nemesis” star proposed in 1984 as the unseen cause of periodic mass extinctions (Marc Davis, Piet Hut, and Richard A. Muller, “Extinction of Species by Periodic Comet Showers,” Nature 308 [1984]: 715–17). ↩︎