Nike

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Nike is the Greek goddess of victory — the personification of triumph in war, in the games, and in any contest decided by superior force or favour. The Romans called her Victoria. In Hesiod’s Theogony she is the daughter of the Titan Pallas and the river-goddess Styx, sister to Kratos (Strength), Bia (Force), and Zelos (Rivalry); when the Olympians went to war against the Titans, Styx brought her children to fight beside Zeus, and they were granted a permanent place at his side as the reward. From that origin Nike carries a particular meaning: victory is not earned by the contestants alone but conferred, a gift in the hands of the gods.

Greek art gave her a settled form. She is winged — one of the few Olympian figures regularly shown in flight — and she descends carrying the tokens of the prize: a laurel wreath to crown the victor, a palm branch, sometimes a fillet or a libation bowl. She rarely stands as the sole object of a cult. More often she appears as an attribute of greater powers, a small figure held in the outstretched hand of a larger god. Pheidias’s colossal Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon held a statue of Nike in her right palm; the Zeus at Olympia did the same. On the Athenian Acropolis the goddess was worshipped in her own right as Athena Nike, the two names fused into a single deity of the city’s success, in a small temple that still stands.

The most famous image to survive bears no inscription naming its dedicator: the Nike of Samothrace, the so-called Winged Victory, carved in the Hellenistic period and now in the Louvre, shows the goddess alighting on the prow of a ship, her drapery driven back by the sea-wind. It is read by historians as a monument to a naval victory, though which one is uncertain.

Under Rome the figure took on a weight the Greek goddess had largely lacked. Victoria became an emblem of the state and of the emperor’s fortune, struck endlessly on coins and raised on triumphal monuments; an altar to her stood in the Senate house from the time of Augustus. That altar became, in the fourth century, the ground of a public quarrel between the senator Symmachus, who pleaded for the old rites, and the bishop Ambrose, who pressed for their removal — a small but pointed episode in the long passage from pagan to Christian Rome. The winged figure outlasted the cult: she survives in later allegory and on war memorials, long after the gods who held her had gone.

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