Astraea Mythology

The name Astraea means starry and describes the goddess in her place among the stars. Hyginus makes her the daughter of Astraeus and Eos, while other sources identify her with Dike, daughter of Zeus and Themis. Both accounts of her parentage circulated side by side in antiquity.

In Hesiod's Theogony, Dike is the daughter of Zeus and Themis, and her name simply means justice. In Works and Days she sits beside her father and reports corrupt judges. In Greek thought Dike is the goddess not of the statute but of what is right. Dike in the family tree →

Themis is a Titan and the goddess of established order, custom and prophecy. She is counted as the holder of the Delphic oracle before Apollo. Her daughter Dike brings the mother's general order down to single cases. Themis in the family tree →

Hesiod names the three daughters of Themis as the Horai: Eunomia, Dike and Eirene. Their names mean good law, justice and peace. The three join the order of the seasons and the order of society in one word.

In the Phaenomena Aratus writes that in the Golden Age Dike came down to the market places and gave counsel to the elders. In that age no one went to law and no boundary stone was set. Hesiod describes the same age in Works and Days as a time of plenty before farming.

According to Aratus, when people grew corrupt in the Silver Age Dike stopped coming down to the cities and withdrew to the mountains. She called to them from the hills in the evening but no longer mixed with them. This middle stage shows that the goddess left step by step rather than all at once.

In the Bronze Age, when people forged swords and began to eat the flesh of the ploughing ox, Dike left the earth entirely and rose to the sky. In the first book of the Metamorphoses Ovid calls her the last of the heavenly ones and says she was the last to leave lands soaked in blood.

Aratus identifies the ascended Dike with the constellation Virgo beside Boötes. Other sources identify the same constellation with Demeter or with Isis. There is therefore no single ancient answer to the question of whose figure Virgo is. The Virgo identification on the Ceres page →

Libra, next to Virgo, was separated from the claws of Scorpio and made an independent sign in the Roman period. Latin poets said those scales were the balance held by the goddess of justice. The identification is poetic, and Greek astronomy makes no such link.

Hesiod writes that at the end of the Iron Age Aidos and Nemesis will wrap themselves in white robes, leave humankind and return to Olympus. Aidos is the sense of shame and Nemesis the deserved return. The departure of Astraea has been read as a continuation of this older scene.

The work of Dike is not to punish but to measure the share correctly. In Greek legal language dike also means a lawsuit, so the word names both the goddess and the court. That double sense shows justice as a procedure carried out rather than an abstract virtue.

The story of Astraea describes a value withdrawing from the world. The goddess does not fight, does not punish and does not argue; she simply leaves the place where she stood. Ancient writers frame this as the story of what people lost by themselves.

After Vesta was found in 1807 no new body appeared in the belt for a long time and the search nearly stopped. The postmaster Karl Ludwig Hencke swept the sky with his own means for fifteen years and found Astraea in 1845. When he found Hebe two years later the survey of the belt gathered speed again.

The historical sign proposed for Astraea is an anchor turned upside down. The anchor has stood for hope since Roman times, and here it is drawn inverted. The glyph used on this page is a drawing of that historical sign.

Astraea never received the attention given to the four large asteroids and its literature is thin. Those who use it connect it with a sense of justice and with the theme of withdrawal. These readings have no link to the classical system of dignities and cannot be added to it.