Nike

Nike is the personification of victory, in battle, in athletic contest, and in any struggle that can be won. In Hesiod's Theogony she is a daughter of the Titan Pallas and the river Styx, and with her siblings Kratos (Strength), Bia (Force) and Zelos (Rivalry) she took the side of Zeus in the war against the Titans, standing beside him ever after. This origin makes her less a goddess with her own myths than an attribute of the powers she serves: winged and swift, she appears again and again in art alighting to crown a victor or held in the hand of a greater deity. A small Nike often stands in the palm of Zeus or of Athena, signifying that victory is in their gift. Rome honoured the same figure as Victoria, and the winged victory remained one of the most enduring images to pass from antiquity into later European art.

Athens took a distinctive, superstitious approach to the goddess on its own Acropolis: the small Ionic Temple of Athena Nike, completed in the 420s BCE, is said by ancient sources to have housed a cult statue of Nike deliberately made without wings, so that Victory, once installed on the Acropolis, could never fly away and abandon the city, a belief later writers such as Harpocration record. The most famous surviving image of the goddess, the Nike of Samothrace, a headless, armless marble masterpiece of the Hellenistic period discovered on the island of Samothrace in 1863 and now displayed at the top of a grand staircase in the Louvre, shows her alighting on a ship's prow, wings still fully spread, and remains one of the most reproduced sculptures from the ancient world.

Nike's afterlife in the modern world has almost nothing to do with worship and everything to do with branding and defense technology, two unrelated borrowings of the same ancient name. In 1971 the sportswear company later called Nike, Inc. took its name from the goddess on the suggestion of an early employee, Jeff Johnson, who reportedly dreamed the word; the company's swoosh logo, designed the same year by graphic design student Carolyn Davidson for a modest fee, is commonly read as an abstracted wing, echoing the goddess's own winged form even though it depicts no literal feather. The choice fit a long pattern of naming athletic and competitive ventures for victory itself, and the brand's global reach has made Nike, for most people who encounter the name today, a shoe company first and a goddess only on reflection.

A very different borrowing came decades earlier from the United States military. The Nike family of surface to air missiles, developed from the late 1940s and deployed through the Cold War, ran from the first operational guided missile system, Nike Ajax, through the larger Nike Hercules and the anti ballistic Nike Zeus, each named for the goddess of victory in a straightforward bid for a fitting, martial name rather than any classical allusion beyond the obvious. Batteries ringed American cities through the 1950s and 1960s as part of continental air defense before being phased out. Between the sneaker and the missile, Nike's name now travels further, and touches more people daily, than her ancient cult at the Acropolis ever did.