Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Dike.
The gallery
Dike and Adikia (Nikosthenic neck-amphora, side B)
Attic vase-painter (Nikosthenic workshop), c. 520 BC
On the reverse of this early Attic bilingual neck-amphora (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, AS IV 3722) the personified Dike, Justice, is shown thrashing the haggard, tattooed figure of Adikia, Injustice, with a hammer or double axe. It is the canonical archaic image of Dike as an active enforcer rather than a passive allegory: the stern maiden who watches mortal wrongs and punishes them, foreshadowing the sword and scales of her later iconography. The scene gives visual form to Hesiod's vision of Dike as the daughter who reports the crooked judgements of men to her father Zeus.
Dike, Goddess of Justice
Jacopo Palma il Giovane, c. 1615-1619
A late-Renaissance Venetian allegory (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMH 1486-1863) in which Palma il Giovane personifies Dike as the goddess of justice, bearing the sword and balance with which she weighs and avenges mortal deeds. The painting translates the Greek personification of righteous order into the post-classical Justitia type, preserving Dike's role as the maiden who upholds straight judgement against the crooked dealings of men.
Astraea Leaves the Earth (The Departure of Astraea)
Salvator Rosa, 1665
Salvator Rosa's canvas (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, GG 9823) depicts Astraea, the star-maiden aspect of Dike, abandoning a corrupt humanity at the close of the Golden Age. As mortals descend into violence and injustice she withdraws from the earth to ascend into the heavens, where, following Ovid and Aratus, she becomes the constellation Virgo. The work captures the elegiac other half of Dike's myth: the just virgin who, unable to bear the wickedness of men, departs the world for the sky.