Nemesis

The Answer to Excess

Hesiod lists Nemesis among the children Night bore without a partner, 'a pain to mortal men'. The word means the indignation stirred by something out of proportion, and the power that restores the balance. In Works and Days, when the age of iron has fully decayed, Shame (Aidos) and Nemesis wrap themselves in white robes and leave the earth for the gods, abandoning humankind to its miseries.

Rhamnous

Nemesis was worshipped above all at Rhamnous on the north-east coast of Attica, where a Classical temple held her cult statue; she was known there as Rhamnousia. Later art gives her attributes of measure and restraint, such as the measuring rod and the bridle.

Mother of Helen

The Cypria, a lost epic of the Trojan cycle known through fragments, told how Zeus pursued Nemesis as she fled through many shapes and fathered Helen on her. Apollodorus records a version in which she became a goose and Zeus a swan, and the egg she laid was brought to Leda, who raised Helen as her own. The story sets the goddess of retribution at the origin of the Trojan War.