Two Genealogies, One Star

Classical sources hand down two different families for Astraea rather than one, and neither drives the other out of use. The older strand makes her a daughter of the Titan Astraeus, whose name itself means starry and who fathers the winds and the stars on Eos, the dawn, in Hesiod's Theogony, so that Astraea belongs among a cluster of astral and atmospheric divinities rather than to the Olympian generation proper.

A separate and, by the time of Aratus and Ovid, more commonly repeated tradition identifies her instead with Dike, justice personified, daughter of Zeus and Themis, who walks among mortals in the Golden Age and flees them in the Iron Age exactly as Astraea is said to. Ancient mythographers themselves noticed the overlap and generally resolved it by treating Astraea and Dike as names for one figure viewed from two angles, her stellar ancestry describing what she becomes and her Olympian parentage describing the moral office she holds while still on earth, though the sources never fully harmonize the two family trees into a single agreed account. What survives the disagreement intact is the constellation: whichever parentage a given author prefers, Virgo in the sky is consistently read as Astraea, justice in retreat but not gone.