The Last Immortal to Leave the Earth

Ovid's Metamorphoses opens with the decline of the ages of humankind, gold sliding into silver, silver into bronze, and bronze into an iron age of open violence and greed, brother turning against brother and hosts against guests. As the gods withdraw one by one from a world grown intolerable to them, Astraea is named the last to go, reluctant to abandon a species she has watched fall this far and lingering after every other immortal has already retreated to the heavens.

When she finally leaves, ancient astronomers and poets place her among the stars as the constellation Virgo, carrying beside her the scales that become Libra, so that justice withdrawn from human affairs is imagined not as destroyed but as removed to a distance, watching from above with the instrument for weighing right and wrong still in her hand. The image proved durable well past antiquity: Renaissance and early modern writers reused Astraea's return as a figure for a hoped for restoration of a just age, most famously flattering Elizabeth I of England as a returning Astraea whose reign might reopen the Golden Age her departure had ended.