by Jack Lindsay
Nemesis and Artemis shared the epithet Oupis, which may be linked with opizesthai: to look on or watch with awe and dread. Artemis is the Watcher over women in travail; and in literature Oupis is extended for Nemesis to mean the Watcher over human life. An inscription calls her ‘You who behold the deeds of men, Oupis of Rhamnousia’. Shape-shifter and huntress, she was given offerings by hunters; she was depicted with bow and arrows; and she had griffins in her train like Aphrodite and Artemis — certainly at Smyrna, where coins of the first century AD show her in dual form in a car drawn by winged griffins.[392] At Smyrna too she was associated with an Aiolic form of Dionysos, Breseus (Briseus).[393] She had strong links with the underworld, a Daughter of Night like the Fates and the Kēres, like Deceit, Love, Old Age, Strife (according to Hesiod), and was associated with the snake.[394] A third-century decree, dealing with the Nemeseia at Rhamnous, makes clear her chthonic nature; and things must have been the same at Athens, or we would meet comments on this point. A passage in Demosthenes suggests that the festival was at times celebrated by individual families as well as in a city rite honouring the dead.[395]
In late times she was easily merged with Adrasteia, taken as a figure of Irresistible Fate. Strabon tells us of the Plain of Adrasteia in the Troad; ‘There is however no temple of Adrasteia, nor of Nemesis, to be seen — though the former has a temple near Kyzikos. Antimachos states: There’s a great goddess Nemesis who’s got as her portion all these things from the Blessed Ones. Adrastos first built her an altar by Aisopos River, where under the name of Adrasteia she’s worshipped.’ All that merely shows the late confusion of the two deities.[396]
It was easy thus for Nemesis to be also identified with Justice, Dikē, and to gain a certain eschatological significance. Aequitas got something of the same meaning as Nemesis-Dikē; and the scales, now at times attributed to Nemesis, appear on Roman tombstones. The imagery goes far back to the psychostasis or soul-weighing, depicted on vases and in sculpture, where the fates of two rival heroes are weighed in the balance. In the Iliad Zeus, deciding the fates of Achilles and Hektor, uses golden scales; but what he weighs are the Kēres or spirits of death. The Orphics, influenced by Egyptian ideas of the dead man’s heart weighed against Truth, probably developed the scheme of a universal weighing of souls after death. We find also a few sculptures of Kairos (due proportion or measure, the right or critical moment) with a pair of scales. In some Mykenean tombs small fragile scales have been found, with figures of butterflies. As the Greeks later used the word psyche for both butterfly and soul, it has been surmised that the scales symbolized some after-death psychostasis; but as they seem to occur only in graves of women and children, it would be unsafe to make too much of them.[397]
In inscriptions as well as in literature Nemesis became a watcher over tombs, an avenger, especially of violent death; and at times like the Erinyes she could herself bring death about. But all developments making her into a figure embodying modern ideas of nemesis are late. In late art she was given attributes like those of the Etruscan Erinyes: wings, short chiton, sword. She further appeared as soul-guide with the caduceus of Hermes, and even as judge of the dead. The Orphics made her a queen of the dead.[398]
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We see then that the early Nemesis was a fit mother for Helen of the planetree and cult-dances. She had her fate aspect, with a strong chthonic bias shown in her festival of the dead; she had her close affinities with the Moirai as expressing the share that each person got of life and death, but she was also akin to Themis, representing and maintaining the due order of things, and so in time becoming a punisher of those who broke that order. Her Aphrodite side links her with the daimonic aspect of Helen; but her Themis side makes her condemn the various actions by which Helen oversteps limits and breaks the due order. As we have seen, a key question of Greek culture was the extent to which one accepted Helen’s daimonic absorption in her own beauty, or to which one judged it as morally indefensible. In this sense the Watcher of the situation was Nemesis, deciding where to lay down the limits that could not be ignored without disaster. She was thus the inescapable companion of Helen in the changing definitions and judgements of the following centuries. The concept and image of Helen lay at the heart of Greek culture, of the unceasing efforts to reaffirm and revalue the whole idea of limits and lots, of the necessary order in the life-process. Though these efforts issued in time in systems of analytic ethics, their scope was larger than any such systems; for they sought to express the struggle of men to act morally and to know themselves (their nature and its limits), and at the same time to evade all closed systems, all dogmatic finalities. In the expansive activities of men, and the conflicts they begot, there were always the two Strifes of Hesiod, something good and something bad; and while hybris must be avoided as far as was humanly possible, and the phthonos of the gods (their envy, spite, indignation, but more deeply, their response to hybris) must be averted, there was an unpredictable overflow of energy in men and women that could not simply be condemned and resisted because of its dangers of provoking the hybris-phthonos situation. That was why Helen with her beauty as a form of daimonic energy was a complex symbol of what was both most precious and most villainous in human life; and the moral depth of Homer lay precisely in the way in which he gave no ready-made answers to the problems she aroused, or indeed to any of the other great problems the Iliad dealt with (individual self-assertion and collective loyalty), but presented the living situation in its fullness.
The working out of explicit ethical systems went on side by side with the turning of various deities of natural process (Moirai, Erinyes, Nemesis, Themis) into abstract personifications of fate or justice, or at least with the modification of the process aspect and the strengthening of the aspect of direct moral force. There was both gain and loss in this development: a loss of the more organic concepts of the Homeric world and a gain in analytic comprehension. The social background (or rather in-ground) of it all lay in the movement from a phase in which there was still a vital balance between tribal elements and the new mercantile city-states, towards and into the fully developed city-state (with fifth-century Athens as the apex). Between the ninth and the fifth century there was a steady, if zigzag, increase in social division and the class struggle, with the climax in Athens, where there was a reassertion of tribal elements on the new level, working out as demokratia, but also a rapid increase in inner contradictions, through the growth of slavery (especially in industry), the worsening of the lot of the peasantry, and the appearance of imperial exploitations through the Delian League. We need then to end this chapter with some further examination of the way in which nature-goddesses were changed into moral concepts or fate-forces and the idea of the share or lot was put into action socially and politically.
Deities like Themis and Nemesis, or the Erinyes, developed the function of keeping intact the limits of the area they represented or controlled, an area that included human personality; it was therefore a part of their function to be present and assist at the taking of oaths; they watched that the pledges were not broken. Hence the need felt to develop explicitly the theme of the oath binding all Helen’s suitors (all the Achaian heroes) so as to give full warrant for the destruction of Troy, which had shared Paris’ guilt by becoming his accomplice. A cult in which we see nature-spirits changing into justice-exactors was that of the Praxidikai. These goddesses had a centre in Lakonia and in Boiotian Haliartos. Pausanias says that Menelaos, home from Troy, built them a sanctuary. ‘Before Gythion lies the island Kranae, and Homer says that Alexandros, carrying off Helen, copulated with her there for the first time. On the mainland, opposite the island, is a sanctuary of Aphrodite Migonitis [Mingler or Mater], and the whole place is called Migonion. This sanctuary, they say, was made by Alexandros. But when Menelaos had taken Ilion and returned home eight years after the sack of Troy, he set up in the sanctuary of Migonitis an image of Thetis and the goddesses Praxidikai. Above Migonion is a mountain called Larysion, sacred to Dionysos,
and at the start of spring they hold a festival in honour of the god, and among the things they tell about the ritual is that they find here a ripe bunch of grapes.’ Themis would fit in better here than Thetis, and there may be a copyist’s error. At the open-air sanctuary in Haliartos the Praxidikai had the task of watching over oaths. We find them as a triad: Alalkomenia, Thelxinoia, Aulis — this third one with a cult at Haliartos. The names suggest nature-spirits who were turned into moral concepts or absorbed by great goddesses like Athena and Artemis. An Orphic hymn calls Persephonē Praxidikē.[399]
Now the Moirai need a closer scrutiny. The word moira is related to meiromai, moros, meros, meris (Latin mereo, mereor), all connected with the idea of receiving a portion or share. Moira thus means that which is reserved, destined, for someone — his share. It has been suggested that moira, though not personified in Homer, was in fact the personification of the share; other critics have argued that Moira existed before the idea of moira as a share. All attempts to fix on a moment of personification in the modern sense merely show an inability to enter into the origins of such concepts, which are at once personal, social, religious, ritualist, magical. The root element is always a deep intuition of the life-process, shared equally by man and nature, and the attempt to grasp a particular moment of experience, in which the relationship of the individual to the whole movement of society and nature is realized in a flash of comprehension, so that the vast interweaving of forces, dangerous and frightening because of their many unknown elements, is reduced to a particular moment, form, meaning, without losing its vital link with the whole.
The individual share of life and the critical moment (the moment of union and of objectification) are thus closely linked. That is, the Moirai and the Horai are related and in the last resort are one. Above the head of the image of Zeus at Megara ‘are the Seasons and Fates, and all may see that he is the only god obeyed by Destiny [Pepromenē, from an assumed verb porein, to give or offer — so, ‘what is given, destined’], and that he apportions [nemein] the Seasons as is due’. The Horai represent the right or fitting moment of time division, any part of the day, month, year, season. They are especially connected with Aphrodite as her toilet-attendants, though they also attend Dionysos and other deities. We may note how their names, Eunomia, Dikē, Eirene (Peace), declare that they too give balance, proportion, measure. It is not surprising then to find moira appearing in the terms of the early Ionian philosophers (for example, Anaxa-goras) to mean a simple portion of substance. Moirai are such portions which do not exist independently. The thinkers are then returning to the tribal concept of equality in share or portion; and moira played its part in maintaining the sense of equal proportions and just measures in the universe, from which proceeded the idea of natural law.[400]
We have seen in relation to Ariadne the deep significance of spinning and weaving as human (female) activities which merged their practitioner with natural process and gave her magical masteries. In Homer there is both one Moira and the group, the Klōthes, Spinners; Hesiod has the triad. That the KlOthes are already ancient in Homer’s day is shown by his use of the verb epiklōthō. Thus in the Odyssey we find: ‘Meanwhile he’ll not suffer any evil or harm till he set foot in his own land; after that he’ll suffer whatever Aisa and the heavy Klōthes spun with their thread for him at his birth, when his mother bore him.’ Hesiod tells us that Night bore without a father ‘the Moirai and ruthlessly avenging Kēres, Klōthō and Lachesis and Atropos, who give men at their birth both good and evil to possess; and they pursue the transgressors of men and gods. And these goddesses never cease from their dread anger till they punish the sinner with a sore penalty. Also deadly Night bore Nemesis.’ They could however be diverted; Apollo made them drunk to save Admetos from his appointed death-day.
There are four of them in an early depiction of the marriage of Thetis; at Delphoi they were two, a Moira of birth and a Moira of death, who took part in the War against the Giants, wielding brazen pestles. Empedokles of Sicily said there were two types of daimones or moirai who inaugurated man’s life at birth. In Euripides, Iphigeneia cries out against the evil daimōn who brought her out of the womb, and the Moirai who delivered her mother of a child so wretched. They were present at the birth of the hero Meleagros. Klōthō prophesied that he would be of a noble nature; Lachesis foretold his stature as a hero; Atropos said that he would live as long as the log which at that moment was on the fire. The mother snatched the log out. (Here we see a direct example, carried on through folklore, of the external soul or other self.)[401]
Hesiod in another version of the origin of the Moirai makes them daughters of Zeus and Themis. According to the later Orphics they lived aloft in heaven, in a cave, by a pool which sent its white waters gushing from the cave; the trio corresponded to the three phases of the moon. Hence Orpheus sings of the Moirai in white raiment.[402]
We find a revealing formula in the Iliad and Odyssey: ‘It lies on the knees of the gods.’ The phrase refers to unworked wool lying on the knees of spinners. So the fates of men as worked out by the gods is made one with the pattern of cloth woven by the Moirai, which begins as a mere confused mass of wool. The names of the triad are hard to make out, apart from Klōthō, the Spinner. Lachesis is the Apportioner, which could refer to apportioning the work or the materials. Atropos has the same root as trepein, to turn; and the ancients interpreted the name as meaning ‘she whose work cannot be turned back, unspun’. Aischylos understood the name thus; but one cannot see what action of spinning could be referred to, unless we take the word to mean ‘she whose work cannot be unravelled’, in the way that Penelope unravelled her web.
The deepest reason why the Fates spun and wove lay in the original importance of these craft activities as a woman’s mystery. The Cypria described the whole intricate movement of natural process as the weaving work of the nymphs; Aristeides saw city life, with its complex crisscrossings of relationships, as the robe woven by the Nymphs and Graces. But no doubt the rich significance of the crafts was also helped by the feeling that clothes were more than a mere extension of the wearer; they became a part of him. We may note the practices of decorating the body by tattooing, painting, scarification, or the attachment of ornaments (all at first felt as life-enhancing). In Greece the newborn child was wrapped in swaddling-bands and amulets, such as necklaces or rings; these were called anagnorismata or tokens, and the central part they play in the many myths of the recognition of the exposed child brings out their deep and intimate links with the child’s identity. (We saw how the moment of anagnorōsis or Recognition had a key role in the structure of tragedy.) Tattooing was also known to the Greeks, for instance among the Spartoi of Thebes whose bodies were marked with a spear (certainly a tattoo) from birth; and the Dionysiac cult-associations, at least at times, used tattooed signs, which must have represented a self-dedication to the god.[403]
We saw how the myth of Herakles and Queen Navel held more than the reflection of transvestist marriage customs; it showed the greatest of male heroes subjected to the female principle. Herakles spun. We find several mythical queens’ names oddly linked with crafts. Harmonia meant the fitting and joining of carpentry-work. The Praxitheai were married to the primeval Attic kings, Erechtheus and Erichthonios; we can reduce the pairs to a single Praxithea and a single king. The female name means Goddess of Praxis. Praxis in Homer means transaction, or trade, business; later, action in general, with special references to magical spells or sexual intercourse. The son of Praxithea, Kekrops, married Metiadousa, she who delights in Mētis. Mētis means counsel, skill, craft. In myth Mētis was the first wife of Zeus, who in the end swallowed her and became pregnant with Athena; she was a shape-shifter, taking various forms (like Thetis or Nemesis) to escape her wooer; she gave Zeus counsel. The word mētis has the same root as Latin metior and Old English maep, and means ‘measure’. King Aigeus had three Wives. One was Mēta (the same as Mētis), who, through her father Hoplēs, shows a link with a craft fraternity that made hopla,
tools and instruments. A second was Chalkiopē, daughter of Chalkon the bronze-worker (or Chalkodon, an instrument of the forge), also called daughter of Thexenor, the Striker (on the anvil?). Mētis, we may further note, has the same root as Mēdeia, the supreme witch of herbal magic; and Homer uses the metaphor of ‘weaving a mētis’, giving counsel.[404]
What are we to make of all this? Surely that in early days there were goddesses presiding over craft fraternities and that women’s magic played an important part in their recipes and practices, even when, as with bronze-forging or tool-making, the workers were presumably male. This discovery, when we link it with the fact of the obvious preponderance of goddesses, as mothers, birth-fates, death-fates, nurses, presiders over initiations and sacred dances, in early Greek religion, raises the question of how far the Bronze-Age communities were dominated by women or at least had matrilineal systems of marriage, with a much higher status for women than in historical times. When we look at the survivals of marriage customs in the Aegean area, especially on the eastern side, we find many proofs that earlier the systems were matrilinear and probably matrilocal: that is, tracing descent through the mother and requiring a husband to live with his wife’s people rather than the other way round. To speak of matriarchy is to beg too many questions, though Strabon says of the Cantabri of Spain that they have ‘a form of matriarchy, gynokratia; the daughters inherit and give their brothers in marriage’. In Lykia, says Herodotos, ‘if you ask a man who he is, he replies by naming his mother and his mother’s mother’. He noted: ‘Sons were not obliged to support their parents, but daughters were.’ Tradition in Attika held that Kekrops instituted marriage (that is, of a patrilinear kind); previously ‘intercourse was promiscuous with the result that sons did not know their fathers nor fathers their sons. The children were named after their mothers.’ Such a situation seemed total confusion to the patriarchally minded. Traces of matrilinear societies can be made out along the Leleges, the Karians, the Lydians. We know little of Minoan society apart from what the art tells us, together with what appear to be religious survivals; but it seems sure that women had a high status there. Ploutarch knew the tradition that ‘in Crete it had been customary for women to appear in public’. The Greeks themselves, who seem in Mykenean days to have taken over many Minoan attitudes, showed survivals of matrilinear systems. The colony of Lokroi Epizephyrioi in the toe of Italy was founded from Lokris in central Greece, where the earliest folk, says Aristotle, were Leleges. ‘All their ancestral honours,’ Polybios records, ‘are traced through women, as for example the noble rank enjoyed by descendants of the Hundred Families.’ They, like Lydians and Etruscans, carried on prenuptial promiscuity; and theirs was the first Greek state to codify its laws, which incidentally made the alienation of ancestral estates illegal. Matrilineal succession to real property still survived on many islands, including Lesbos, Lemnos, Naxos, Kos, at the end of the eighteenth century AD.[405]
