Nike

The account

Nike is one of four children Styx brought to Zeus at the start of the war and left there permanently: Zelos, Nike, Kratos and Bia — Rivalry, Victory, Power and Force. Hesiod says they have no house apart from Zeus and no seat except where he leads them, and that they dwell with him forever. That is a precise theological claim about where victory comes from. She has almost no narrative and an enormous presence in art, because she is the figure you put on a monument: winged, alighting, robes still moving from the descent, usually crowning someone or setting up a trophy. Athens built her a small temple on the bastion beside the entrance to the Acropolis, and the cult statue there had no wings — Pausanias reports the Athenians explaining that they had made her wingless so that she would stay. She merges steadily with Athena, who is worshipped there as Athena Nike, and in Roman hands she becomes Victoria and stands over the empire's coinage for four hundred years.