Nemesis personifies the divine resentment that falls on those who exceed the measure, the too-fortunate, the arrogant, the boastful, and restores the balance the gods require; her name is from nemein, to deal out what is due. Her principal sanctuary stood at Rhamnous on the coast of Attica, where a famous cult statue, attributed in antiquity to Agoracritus (a pupil of Phidias) and said to have been carved from a block of marble the overconfident Persians had brought to make a victory monument, embodied the idea that pride precedes a fall. A tradition distinct from the common one made Nemesis, not Leda, the mother of Helen by Zeus, so that the war Helen caused was itself an instrument of divine retribution. In the Roman period she was widely invoked, especially in the amphitheatre, where gladiators and beast-fighters prayed to her against the turning of fortune.
In later Roman art, especially in the eastern provinces, Nemesis is often shown holding a measuring rod or a bridle, symbols of the check she places on human ambition, and sometimes a wheel recalling the turning of fortune, occasionally riding in a chariot drawn by griffins; this Roman-period Nemesis increasingly merged with the goddess Fortuna in what art historians term a Nemesis-Fortuna syncretism, widely attested on inscriptions and reliefs from Roman Egypt to the Danube provinces, wherever soldiers, gladiators and ordinary petitioners sought protection against an unpredictable and potentially punishing turn of luck.