Themis

Themis personifies themis, established custom, right order, what is laid down, as distinct from dike, the verdict in a particular case; she is the principle by which gods and mortals alike keep to their proper bounds. A tradition preserved by Aeschylus and others made her an early holder of the Delphic oracle, between Gaia and Apollo, so that lawful order and prophecy share a source.

As a consort of Zeus she bears the Horai, the Seasons that regulate the year, and the Moirai, the three Fates, offspring that make her the mother of both natural and moral order. Shown holding scales and, later, blindfolded, she is the ancient model behind the modern allegory of Justice, though the blindfold and sword are post-Classical additions to her ancient balance. Themis's afterlife as an emblem of abstract Justice, holding scales and later a sword and blindfold, became one of the most widely reproduced allegorical figures in Western art and public architecture from the Renaissance onward, adorning courthouses and legal texts across Europe and its colonies; the blindfold, absent from ancient images of either Themis or her Roman counterpart Iustitia, is a distinctly later addition, generally traced to fifteenth-century German art, where it began as a satirical comment on corrupt justice before it was reinterpreted as a positive symbol of impartiality.

Beyond her later role as an emblem of blindfolded Justice, Themis's name is bound directly into the technical vocabulary of the earliest Greek ideas about law, in a way that is easy to miss once the word has passed into English simply as an abstract noun. In Homeric society a ruling king did not invent law so much as receive and pronounce themistes, judgments or ordinances understood to be handed down from Zeus through the king rather than devised by human reasoning alone, and Homer specifically shows Themis herself, at Zeus's command, as the one who summons the gods to assembly, most memorably in the Iliad, where she calls the divine council together before the renewed fighting at Troy, a function that casts her not merely as a personification of abstract order but as the specific goddess who convenes the process by which order is publicly declared. The plural themistes recurs across early Greek epic and legal vocabulary as the term for the pronouncements a legitimate ruler is expected to deliver, so the goddess's name and the technical term for kingly judgment are, etymologically and conceptually, the same word doing two kinds of work at once.

This linguistic fact matters for how classicists read early Greek political thought: a society that named its rulers' judgments after a goddess of established, laid-down order was expressing a specific claim, that legitimate law is received and pronounced rather than freely invented by whoever holds power, a claim considerably older than, and different in kind from, the later philosophical debates about justice that Plato and Aristotle would eventually build on this same inherited vocabulary.