NEMESI (Νέμισος). - The idea, widespread in ancient religions, of the hostility of the gods towards the excessive good fortune or pride of men—an hostility that assumes actual forms of vengeance—in Greece, already in the Homeric age or immediately afterwards, underwent an independent development, becoming a particular divine figure (both in the cyclic poem Cypria [frg. IX, 3] and in Hesiod, Theogony, l. 223), who thus presided over the restoration of equilibrium in the relations between divinity and man; but, remembered chiefly in poetry, N. remained a rather pale and cold figure.
She had worship in various places in Greece; but the most famous and oldest was that of Ramnunte (whence the name N. Rhamnusia), an Attic deme near Marathon, where, about the 5th century B.C., a temple was dedicated to her, attended by a priestess (who at the same time cared for a nearby temple of the goddess Themis), and in which Agoracito, a pupil of Fidia, had carved a celebrated statue of the goddess (the head of which was found in the excavations). At Athens, on the 5th of Boedromion, the Nemesie were celebrated, though they properly belonged to the cult of the dead. But it is quite probable that the islands and Asian coasts possessed the original cult of N., of which various traces are known, including the image of the goddess worshipped at Smirne from the 6th century B.C. onwards (Pausania, IX, 35, 6), and the identification of N. with the Phrygian goddess Adrastea, made by a lyric poet of Colofone (G. Kinkel, Epic. gr. fragm., I, p. 289, n. 43).