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.