Astraea

Summary

Astraea is a maiden in Greek and Roman myth who lived among people in the first age and gave them judgement, then left the earth when they grew corrupt and rose to the sky, where she is the constellation Virgo, seen at night near Boötes with an ear of grain in her hand. The oldest telling of her story is by the poet Aratus in his Phaenomena, in the third century BCE; he does not call her Astraea but "the Maiden", and says people called her Dike, Justice.

Aratus says: whether she is the daughter of Astraeus, who men say was of old the father of the stars, or the child of another father, she once lived on earth and met men and women face to face, and sat among them, immortal though she was. She gathered the elders in the market-place or in the wide streets and raised her voice, urging them to judgements kinder to the people. People knew no strife and no war, did not sail the sea, and no ships brought their living from afar; the oxen, the plough and Justice herself gave them all they needed. When the Silver Race came she mingled with them less: she came down alone from the hills at evening and spoke gently to no one, and when the heights were full of people she rebuked them and said she would never again show them her face: see what a race the fathers of the Golden Age have left, meaner than themselves, and you will breed a worse one, and there will be wars and blood. Then she went back to the hills while the people gazed after her. When these too were dead and the Race of Bronze was born, the first to forge the highwayman's sword and the first to eat the ox that draws the plough, she loathed that race and flew to heaven, and took up the place where she is seen at night.

At the start of Ovid's Metamorphoses her name appears. Ovid counts four ages, gold, silver, bronze and iron, and when he reaches iron he says that shame, truth and faith fled the earth and in their place came tricks, treachery, violence and the love of possession; the land, once common like sunlight and air, was marked out with boundaries and dug for iron and gold; the guest was not safe from his host, nor brother from brother. "Piety lies vanquished, and the maiden Astraea, last of the heavenly ones, has left the earth wet with slaughter." Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.127–150.

Hyginus, in his book on the stars, gathers what was said of her parents: Hesiod, he says, makes her the daughter of Zeus and Themis, Aratus the daughter of Astraeus and Eos, the Dawn; she led mankind in the Golden Age and was called Justice for her care and fairness, and when the Race of Bronze was born she could bear it no longer and flew to the stars. The two descents match her two faces. In the Theogony Themis bears to Zeus the Horai, among them Dike, Justice; and Eos bears to Astraeus the winds, the morning star and the stars that crown the sky. By the first descent she is Justice, by the second a star.

The idea the story turns on is that justice is a person who stays among people as long as they are worthy of her. She is not killed and does not die; she withdraws by stages: she sits in the market-place with the Golden Race, comes down alone from the hills to the Silver Race, and rises to the sky from the race that forged the sword and ate the plough-ox. Her distance measures how far people have fallen, and she remains in a place they see every night. That is why poets could speak of her return: Virgil's Eclogues say the Maiden is coming back, and with her the reign of Saturn. Her story is the last link in the Golden Age. Virgil, Eclogue 4.6.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the essays do not read this Greek name. Astraía is the feminine of the Greek adjective "starry"; take away the ending -aia and astr- remains: a glottal onset, s, t and r. These are the letters of ʿAthtar, Ishtar and Ashtart, the star-name which the Babylonian and the Canaanite essays of this project read in the goddess's name: the planet Venus, the morning star. The Greeks wrote Ashtart's own name with these letters, dropping the ʿayn and writing sh as s. On this reading Astraea is "she of ʿAthtar", the one belonging to the star, which is what she becomes in the story.

Linguistic Root

Forms of the name

Astraea and ʿAthtar

This is a reading proposed on the method. LSJ gives the adjective astraîos as "starry", from ástron, star; Astraea is its feminine and Astraeus, father of the stars, its masculine. The Babylonian essay reads Ishtar as ʿAthtar, the planet Venus, the shining one, and the Canaanite essay reads Ashtart as "the morning star". The Greeks wrote Ashtart's name Astártē: they dropped the ʿayn, which Greek lacks, wrote sh as s, and kept t and r. The four letters at the start of Astraía are these letters in this order, and the story makes their bearer a star.

We put the reading to four tests. First, the form: the Greek word for star is attested from Homer on, and so is the adjective, so no unwritten form is assumed. Second, the correspondence: dropping the ʿayn and writing sh as s is what the Greeks did with Ashtart's own name, as the Astarte page shows. Third, the dictionary: Lane gives the root ʿ-th-r no sense "star"; it keeps ʿaththariyy, crops watered by rain alone, which Robertson Smith read as "belonging to ʿAthtar". Arabic keeps the god's name, not a common word for star built on these letters. Fourth, the story: Astraea becomes a star and ʿAthtar is a star, but ʿAthtar is the planet Venus and Astraea the constellation Virgo, two different things in the sky.

The largest weakness is that the Greek word for star has sisters across the Indo-European languages: Hittite ḫašter-, Latin stella, Sanskrit tā́rā-, Gothic stairnō. Beekes takes them back to one form beginning with a guttural that disappeared in Greek, leaving its trace in the initial a-. So the Greeks did not borrow the word from the Phoenicians, and if the comparison holds it belongs to a layer older than Greek. It is worth noting that Hittite writes the start of the word with ḫ, the position ʿ holds in ʿAthtar. What would settle the reading is a Semitic common noun on these letters meaning "star", or an old form that keeps the guttural before s-t-r.

As for saṭara, its letters are close, but Lane's senses are a line of writing, a row of trees, asāṭīr "tales", and musayṭir, one holding authority; none is a star.

Themis and dhimma

Hesiod makes Astraea, in her face as Dike, the daughter of Themis. The Greek essay of this project reads Themis as dhimma: covenant, compact, settled order. Lane gives dhimma as a compact, covenant or bond, and a right for the neglect of which one is blamed. On this reading the mother is the covenant between people and the daughter the judgement that keeps it, who leaves the earth when it is broken.

The ear of grain

Aratus says the Maiden holds a gleaming ear of grain, the star the Arabs call al-simāk al-aʿzal, Spica. Akkadian šubultu is an ear of grain and the name of this same star; Hebrew šibbōlet is an ear of grain. Lane gives sunbula as one ear among the sanābil, and al-sunbula as the name of a sign of the zodiac, Virgo; Lane also lists sunbul under the root s-b-l, treating the n as added to s-b-l. These are three written witnesses that make the ear of grain the name of the star, not a proposed reading.

Key Mythic Narratives

Dike in Hesiod

About five centuries before Aratus, Hesiod's Works and Days already speaks of Justice as a living maiden. When Dike is dragged where bribe-swallowing men take her, who give crooked judgements, she follows weeping to the city and the homes of its people, wrapped in mist, bringing harm to those who drove her out. And: there is the maiden Dike, daughter of Zeus, honoured by the gods of Olympus; when anyone hurts her with lying, she sits beside her father Zeus, son of Kronos, and tells him of men's unjust hearts, until the people pay for the wrongs of their kings. Of the end of the Iron Race he says that Aidos and Nemesis will leave the wide earth wrapped in white robes and join the immortals, and no help against evil will remain. Justice that withdraws from people and values that rise to heaven are both in Hesiod; Aratus gathered them into one figure.

The Maiden's return in Virgil

Virgil's Georgics say that when Justice left the earth her last footsteps were among the country people, where her trace remained. In the fourth Eclogue he announces that the last age foretold by the Sibyl of Cumae has come and that the great cycle of the ages is born anew: "now the Maiden returns, the reign of Saturn returns"; a new generation is sent down from heaven, and a golden race will rise throughout the world. The star to which Astraea rose became for Virgil a sign that the first age could come back.

Other names for the constellation

Hyginus reports that others call the Maiden in the sky Fortune, or Ceres of the crops, and that they dispute about her because her head is faint and hard to see. Some call her Erigone, daughter of Icarius, who hanged herself in grief for her father; some make her a daughter of Apollo who died young and was placed among the stars by her father. The constellation is one, the stories told of it many, and the story of departing Justice is one of them.

Symbolic Reading

The Greek essay of this project reads Hesiod's races as a compressed history of human craft: the Bronze Race is literally the time of smelting bronze, making weapons and organised war, and the Iron Race is Hesiod's own time. Aratus's story of Astraea gives this reading two precise witnesses: Justice leaves the earth when people make the highwayman's sword and when they eat the ox that ploughs for them, that is, when the weapon becomes a way of living and the farmer's partner in work is slaughtered. The essay, however, makes the Golden Age the time of hunting and gathering before agriculture, while Aratus puts the oxen and the plough in the Golden Age itself, so his Justice is the justice of the farming village before sea-trade and war. Ovid is closer to the essay: his Golden Age has no plough, and the first thing divided in his Iron Age is the land.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Iran Yima was king of the age with no cold and no heat, no old age and no death; when he came to love falsehood the royal glory left him, and it was seen flying away from him in the shape of a bird. As Astraea rises away from people when they grow corrupt, the glory flies from the king when he lies, and in both the departing thing is seen as it goes.

In India the Laws of Manu say that dharma, right and order, stands in the first age on four whole feet, and in each later age loses one foot through theft, falsehood and fraud. The two images meet in measuring the decline: Astraea withdraws one step with each race, and dharma loses a quarter with each age, as Hanuman tells it in the Mahābhārata.

In the Near East Ishtar and Astarte were the morning and evening star, the reading on which Astraea's name rests here. They differ from her in everything else: Ishtar is a goddess of love and war, Astraea a maiden who judges. What joins them in the sky is the ear of grain the Maiden holds, which the Akkadians call šubultu, by the very word for an ear of grain.