NEMESIS (Némisos). - The idea, widespread in the ancient religions, of the hostility of the gods toward the excessive fortune or pride of men, a hostility that reaches genuine forms of vengeance, in Greece, already in the Homeric age or immediately after, had an autonomous development, becoming a particular divine figure (both in the cyclic poem Cypria [frg. IX, 3], and in Hesiod, Theogony, v. 223), which therefore presided over the restoration of equilibrium in the relations between the divinity and man; but, remembered above all in poetry, N. remained a rather pale and cold figure.
She had a cult in various places in Greece; but the most famous and most ancient was that of Rhamnus (whence the name of N. Rhamnusia), an Attic 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 sculpted a famous statue of the goddess (whose head was found in the excavations). At Athens on the 5th of Boedromion the Nemesia were celebrated, belonging, however, to the cult of the dead. But it is quite probable that it was the islands and the Asiatic coasts that had the original cult of N., of which various traces are known, among them the image of the goddess venerated at Smyrna as early as the 6th century B.C. (Pausanias, IX, 35, 6), and the identification of N. with the Phrygian goddess Adrasteia, made by a lyric poet of Colophon (G. Kinkel, Epic. gr. fragm., I, p. 289, n. 43).
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Cesare D'Onofrio