sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 5

Daniela Bonanno: Nemesis

This study builds on as many as eight previous articles by the author, who has been publishing in this area since 2015.

A substantial introduction, "The Nemesis of the Ancients and Moderns" (15-51), takes Pausanias' description (1.33) of the cult statue at Rhamnous as its point of departure, proposing to juxtapose literary testimonia for the usage of nemesis vocabulary with our knowledge of the cult in order "to interpret the nature of the relationship between the concept and the theonym, between the emotion and the manner in which the Greeks perceived and represented the homonymous divine power" (19).

Before embarking on this, however, Bonanno provides an exhaustive review of scholarship on the goddess, covering major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies such as Herder's Nemesis. Ein lehrendes Sinnbild (1786), Tournier's Némésis et la jalousie des dieux (1863), and Posnansky's Nemesis und Adrasteia (1890), and entries for "Nemesis" in reference works from the same period and later. More recent studies are grouped as treating Nemesis as a "chthonic" or "agrarian" deity, or a personification (including my own Worshipping Virtues [ 1 ]), a category Bonanno finds problematic, or an emotion, from Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) onwards.

Five shorter chapters cover the meaning of nemesis and the development of the goddess in literature: the human emotion in Homer and tragedy (ch.1, 52-81); divine nemesis in the Iliad (ch. 2, 82-95); Nemesis the goddess from Hesiod to the Kypria , Pindar and Euripides (ch. 3, 96-118); "Nemesis in action" in Theognis, Euripides and Herodotus (ch. 4, 119-38); "Invoking Nemesis" (ch. 5, 139-61) breaks the otherwise more or less chronological sequence, drawing as it does on such late sources as the Orphic Hymn to Nemesis , Mesomedes' Hymn to Nemesis and Herodes Atticus' panegyric for Regilla ( IG XIV 1389) for formulae and cult titles; Aristotelean definitions of nemesis (ch. 6, 162-8).

A sixth much longer chapter (162-267), "Living in the shadow of Nemesis" (169-267), discusses the cult at Rhamnous - the deme context, the cult statue and its aitia, Nemesis' relationship with Themis, the role of ephebes garrisoned at the fortress, cult personnel, festivals, and Livia's place in the sanctuary in the first century CE.

The study's aim, as summarised at the end of the introduction (50-51), is admirable: to examine the extent to which usage of nemesis -vocabulary contributes to the construction and development of the goddess of Rhamnous, and the extent to which the cult in turn influences usage of the vocabulary, at a local or panhellenic level. However, there are a number of problems with Bonanno's argument.

The most fundamental is her decision not to take into account the Hellenistic cult of the two Nemeseis at Smyrna or to provide systematic coverage of the goddess' later Roman imperial-period history, despite considering various texts from these later periods. While she has indeed discussed the Smyrna cult in an earlier paper [ 2 ], she does not here consider the possibility of its influence on the older cult at Rhamnous, or the widespread popularity of the iconographical type of the Smyrna Nemeseis, which undoubtedly informed later writers' and artists' visions of the goddess. Discussion of later texts without explicit articulation of their relationship to any chronological framework, especially in chapter 5, likewise works against the project of tracing developments over time, and/or mutual influence between cult and vocabulary-usage.

Another general weakness is a certain superficiality of engagement with previous twentieth- and twenty-first century scholarship, despite the introduction's lengthy literature review. Important work on both nemesis the concept and Nemesis the goddess is often cited just once, with little detail on the scholar's arguments or clear acknowledgement of how much Bonanno's exposition owes to them. While the bibliography is generally quite thorough, there are some omissions - e.g. Douglas Cairns on the controversial Herodotus passage (1.34) about Croesus' "great Nemesis" [ 3 ], Alan Shapiro on Nemesis' one appearance in Attic vase painting [ 4 ], Ken Shapiro Lapatin on the Rhamnous statue base [ 5 ], my own work on Themis. [ 6 ] Likewise, while coverage of primary source material is extensive, a surprising omission is Kratinos' comedy Nemesis , and associated vase imagery.

Overall, then, while the book's premise is thought-provoking, and there is much useful material here, the study does not quite deliver what it promises. The idea of using the cult at Rhamnous as a test-case for examining Nemesis' local identity and setting this against the panhellenic profile traceable in literature is a challenge which remains to be fully met.

Notes :

[ 1 ] E.J. Stafford: Worshipping Virtues: personification and the divine in ancient Greece, Swansea / London 2000.

[ 2 ] D. Bonanno: Squaring Nemesis: Alexander's dream, the Oracle, and the foundation of the New Smyrna, in: T. Galoppin / E. Guillon / A. Lätzer-Lasar (et al.) (eds.): Naming and Mapping the Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean. Spaces, Mobilities, Imaginaries, Berlin / Boston 2022, 871-89.

[ 3 ] D.L. Cairns: Hybris, dishonour, and thinking big, in: Journal of Hellenic Studies 116 (1996), 1-32.

[ 4 ] H.A. Shapiro: The origins of allegory in Greek art, in: Boreas 9 (1986), 4-23.

[ 5 ] K.D. Shapiro Lapatin: A family gathering at Rhamnous?, in: Hesperia 61 (1992), 107-19.

[ 6 ] E.J. Stafford: Themis: Religion and order in the archaic polis, in: P.J. Rhodes / Mitchell, L. (eds.): The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece, London 1997, 158-67.