NEMESIS

A Greek divinity, worshipped as the godde of vengeance. According to Heslod, she was the daughter of Night, and was represented as pursuing with inflexible hatred the proud and insolent. The reluctance of the Greeks to speak boastfully of their good fortune, lest they should incur a reverse, is well known; and from various pa ages in the An tho logia, and other ancient writings, it is clear that this feeling originated in a de-ire to propitiate this divinity. The worship of this godde was very extensive. Temples were erected to her honour, not only in Greece, but throughout the Roman empire. Nowhere, however, was her worship so pompously celebrated as at Rhamnus, a town of Attica, where she had a statue 10 cubits high of a single stone, and so exquisitely beautiful as to equal even the finest productions of Phidias. A fragment, supposed to be the head of this statue, was presented to the British Museum in 1820, where it may still he seen. [s. 839]