NEMESIS (Νέμεσις). — The idea, widespread in ancient religions, of the hostility of the gods toward excessive good fortune or pride in men, hostility that takes the form of true vengeance, in Greece, already in the Homeric age or shortly thereafter, developed autonomously into a particular divine figure (both in the cyclic poem Cypria [frg. IX, 3] and in Hesiod, Theogony, V. 223), who thus presided over the restoration of balance in the relationship between divinity and man; but, recalled especially in poetry, Nemesis remained a rather pale and cold figure.
She was worshipped in various places in Greece; but the most famous and oldest was that of Rhamnous (whence the name of N. Rhamnusia), an ancient deme near Marathon, where, around the 5th century B.C., a temple was dedicated to her, guarded by a priestess (who at the same time had charge of a nearby temple of the goddess Themis), and in which Agoracritus, a pupil of Phidias, had carved a famous statue of the goddess (of which the head was found in excavations). At Athens on the 5th of Boedromion the Nemeseia were celebrated, though these were proper to the cult of the dead. But it is highly probable that the islands and the Asian coasts had the original cult of Nemesis, of which various traces are known, including the image of the goddess worshipped at Smyrna as early as the 6th century B.C. (Pausanias, IX, 35, 6), and the identification of Nemesis with the Phrygian goddess Adrasteia, made by a lyric poet of Colophon (G. Kinkel, Epic. gr. fragm., I, p. 289, n. 43).