Astraea

On a clear night in the right season, a figure of stars lies across the sky with one bright point at her hand. The Greek astronomer-poet Aratus, writing in the third century BC, called that point the gleaming Ear of Corn and the whole figure the Maiden. Then he stopped his catalogue of constellations to tell a story about her, and it is the only story in his poem told partly in a god’s own voice.

The tale, he says, was one that circulated among men. Long ago the Maiden lived on the ground, immortal but unbothered by it, and met people face to face. She did not hold herself apart from the tribes of men or of women. People called her Dike, Justice. She would gather the old men in the market-place or in the wide streets and raise her voice to press on them judgements kinder to the people. Nobody yet knew quarrels or the din of battle. The sea stayed far off and no ships fetched food from distant shores, because the oxen, the plough and Justice herself supplied everything a person needed.

Where she came from is left open on purpose. Aratus offers two fathers and refuses to choose: perhaps she was the daughter of Astraeus, the old father of the stars, or perhaps of some other sire. Readers then and now have taken that other sire to be Zeus, because Hesiod, centuries earlier, had already described a virgin Justice who was Zeus’s daughter. In the Works and Days she sits beside her father whenever someone wrongs her with lying words and tells him what is in men’s hearts, until whole peoples pay for the crooked sentences of their princes. Roman mythographers kept both lines going. The handbook of Hyginus gives her Astraeus and the dawn goddess Eos as parents on Aratus’s authority, or Zeus and Themis on Hesiod’s.

Her name is mostly a Roman habit. Aratus never calls her Astraea; he says Maiden and Dike and leaves the starry father as a possibility. Ovid fixed the name in Latin verse when he described the Iron Age in the first book of the Metamorphoses: piety lay defeated, and the virgin Astraea, last of the heavenly ones, left the earth wet with slaughter. Juvenal used her the same way in his sixth satire, sending her up to the gods with Chastity at her side, two sisters running off together.

The decline she watched happened in stages, and Aratus lets the reader watch her patience run out. With the Silver Race she still stayed, but she mixed with people only a little and not gladly. She lived in the hills. At evening she came down alone from the echoing heights, spoke to no one gently, and waited until the crowds had climbed up to fill the high ground. Then she rebuked them. “What a race your golden fathers left behind, far worse than themselves,” she told them, “and you will breed something viler. Wars will come, and cruel bloodshed, and grief laid on men.” She turned back to the hills, and the people stood staring after her.

The Bronze Race was worse. They were the first to forge the highwayman’s sword and the first to eat the ox that pulled their plough. Justice loathed them. She flew up to the sky and took the place where, Aratus says, men still see the Maiden at night. She did not fight for them. She left. The classical scholar Andrew Faulkner, writing in Greece and Rome in 2015, points out what makes this version unusual: Hesiod’s Zeus destroys failing races himself, while Aratus moves the agency to people, so that her prophecy reads as a warning they could still heed, addressed to women as well as men.

Hesiod had told something close to it with other goddesses. In his Iron Age it is Aidos and Nemesis, shame and righteous anger, who wrap their bright forms in pale cloaks and go back to Olympus, leaving nothing behind but bitter pain. Aratus gave the exit to Justice, the Latin poets kept it with her, and the image hardened into a single figure: a goddess who was the last to go.

Later poets could not leave her in the sky. Valerius Flaccus, in his Argonautica, made the stormy season of the year the moment when Astraea as a star pleads against the nations and begs for Jupiter’s anger, leaving the earth and pestering Saturn’s star with complaints. Statius wrote that kindly Astraea looks favourably on the pious and comes back reconciled with Jove. In the fifth century AD the Greek poet Nonnus turned her into a nurse. In his Dionysiaca she takes the infant Beroe, goddess of the law city of Beirut, nurses her on virgin milk, lets streams of statutes run into her mouth, feeds her Attic honey and Apollo’s spring water, and pulls the golden ear of grain out of the stars to hang round the child’s neck.

The line that guaranteed her a second life is barely a sentence. In his fourth Eclogue Virgil announced a new age: now the Virgin returns, now the reign of Saturn returns. The prophecy was attached to Augustus and later read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Renaissance courts took it personally. Frances Yates traced the image to Elizabeth I, the virgin queen presented as the returned virgin of justice ruling a new golden age, and a Dutch refugee living in Elizabethan England wrote that the virgin Astraea had descended from heaven to build her seat in that most happy country. James I’s coronation entry into London carried Virgil’s motto on the Temple Bar arch. In June 1660 John Dryden welcomed Charles II home with a poem called Astraea Redux, Justice Brought Back, and put the same Virgilian line at its head.

Her power was never force. While she stayed, fields fed people, disputes resolved and no one needed ships or swords, so her presence was the whole of the Golden Age’s prosperity. Her voice could warn, prophesy and shame a crowd standing on a hill. Her weakness is the shape of the story. She could not stay where she was not respected, she would not punish, and once she withdrew, even the poets who wanted her back could only say that she was coming.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Astraea in Greek mythology?

Astraea is the virgin goddess of justice who lived among humans during the Golden Age and left the earth when people became violent. The poet Aratus, in the third century BC, calls her the Maiden and Dike (Justice) and says she now shines in the sky as a constellation. The name Astraea itself was made familiar mainly by Roman poets such as Ovid and Juvenal.

Why did Astraea leave the earth?

Astraea left because human beings grew worse with each age. According to Aratus she lived openly among people in the Golden Age, withdrew to the hills in the Silver Age, and flew to the sky when the Bronze Race forged the first swords and ate their ploughing oxen. Ovid says she was the last of the immortals to leave, abandoning an earth wet with slaughter.

Who are Astraea’s parents?

The ancient sources disagree about Astraea’s parents. Aratus suggests she may be the daughter of Astraeus, father of the stars, or of some other father, and the Roman handbook of Hyginus names Astraeus and Eos on that basis. Hyginus also reports that Hesiod made Justice the daughter of Zeus and Themis.

What constellation is Astraea?

Astraea is identified with the constellation of the Maiden, which Latin writers call Virgo. Aratus describes the Maiden holding a gleaming ear of grain, and says she can still be seen at night where she settled after leaving the earth. Later poets such as Valerius Flaccus and Nonnus refer to her as this star figure.

Why was Elizabeth I called Astraea?

Elizabeth I was called Astraea because Renaissance writers applied Virgil’s prophecy “now the Virgin returns, now the reign of Saturn returns” to her as the virgin queen of a new golden age. The historian Frances Yates traced this imagery in detail. The same Virgilian line was later used for James I’s coronation entry and for John Dryden’s 1660 poem Astraea Redux welcoming Charles II.

Related Entries

Themis, Astraeus, Eos, Zeus, Nemesis, Cronus, Saturn, Pandora, Prometheus, Demeter, Callisto, Pleiades, Maat