What does “nemesis” mean?

The goddess who answers a prayer

In Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the beautiful Narcissus has turned away every nymph and every youth who loved him. At last one of the scorned lifts both hands to heaven and asks for a punishment that fits the crime:

“If he should love deny him what he loves!” and as the prayer was uttered it was heard by Nemesis, who granted her assent.

Ovid’s Latin names her Rhamnusia, the lady of Rhamnus, after her great temple at Rhamnous on the coast of Attica, and calls the prayer just. What follows is her work. The boy who would love no one falls for the one face he can never hold, his own reflection, as the page on where the word narcissism comes from tells.

A daughter of Night

Nemesis is far older than Ovid. Hesiod’s Theogony, from around 700 BC, counts her among the children of Night, with Doom, Death, Blame and the Fates:

Also deadly Night bare Nemesis (Indignation) to afflict mortal men

In Hesiod’s Works and Days, the bleakest prophecy of all ends with Aidos and Nemesis, shame and righteous indignation, leaving the earth to join the gods, so that nothing is left to hold people back from wrong (lines 197–201). In the lost epic Cypria, she is even the mother of Helen of Troy.

The name comes from the Greek verb nemein, to deal out, to give each person what is due. Nemesis was not random revenge. She was the anger that answers excess: arrogance, cruelty, and good fortune that has not been earned. Herodotus uses the word for what fell on Croesus, the rich king of Lydia, after he had called himself the happiest of men: a great nemesis from the god (Histories 1.34). Pausanias adds a story about her temple. The Persians who landed at Marathon in 490 BC brought a block of marble to carve a monument to their victory; after their defeat, Phidias carved it into a statue of Nemesis for Rhamnous (Description of Greece 1.33.2–3).

Nemesis or enemy?

In English the goddess’s name first meant retribution itself, or the one who delivers it. From there it drifted to the everyday sense. Today a nemesis is your particular opponent: the rival you keep meeting and cannot beat, or the person or thing that finally brings you down. Sherlock Holmes has Moriarty; a champion has the one player who always seems to beat her.

An enemy can be anyone who stands against you. A nemesis is personal, long-running and, in the old sense, deserved. Something of the goddess still clings to the word: to meet your nemesis is to meet a defeat that was somehow waiting for you. Astronomers borrowed the name in 1984 for a hypothetical dark companion of the Sun, blamed for regular mass extinctions on Earth; no such star has been found.

Narcissus’s nemesis was not a rival at all. It was his own face, sent by a goddess who gives proud people exactly what their pride has asked for. King Midas, whose wish came true to the letter, met the same kind of justice in the golden touch.