Nike- Greek GodDeity"Winged Victory"

Daughter of Styx

Styx, the Oceanid whose waters bounded the underworld, bore four children by the Titan Pallas. Among them were Kratos and Bia, brute strength and force, and Nike, victory itself.

When Zeus called the immortals to war against the Titans, Styx answered first. She brought all four children to Olympus and pledged them to Zeus before a single blow had been struck. The war lasted ten years. The Titans held Mount Othrys; Zeus held Olympus. Between them, the world shook. Nike and her siblings fought at Zeus's side through every battle.

When the Olympians prevailed and hurled the Titans into Tartarus, Zeus honored Styx above all other Oceanids. Oaths sworn by her waters would bind even the gods, and anyone who broke such an oath would lie breathless for a full year, then spend nine years banished from the council and feasts of Olympus. Her children received a simpler reward: they would stand beside Zeus's throne forever.

At Zeus's Side

In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Kratos and Bia drag Prometheus to the rock at the edge of the world where Hephaestus will chain him. Kratos delivers Zeus's orders. Bia says nothing. They are enforcers, and their work is ugly.

Nike's work was different. She carried no chains. She carried a wreath and a palm branch, and when she arrived at a battle or a contest, the outcome was sealed. The side she chose had won. The gods had spoken. She did not argue or explain. She arrived, she chose, she crowned.

In the war against the Giants, she flew above the battlefield and crowned each god's victory the moment the blow landed.

Sweet-Gifting Nike

When a man won the chariot race at Olympia or the foot race at Delphi, the crown of olive or laurel was placed on his head. The crowd roared. And then the moment was already passing. The poets caught it.

Bacchylides addressed Nike directly as "sweet-gifting Nike" and composed odes to be sung at the victor's homecoming. Pindar did the same: his victory odes were performed by trained choruses before the assembled city. The singers turned to Nike and named her aloud, as if she stood among them.

These were commissions. A victor's family paid the poet and hired the chorus. The city gathered at night, torches lit. The chorus sang, and for a few hours the moment of triumph was held open. Then the torches burned down and the crowd went home.

The Wingless Statue

The Athenians built a temple to Athena Nike on a bastion overlooking the entrance to the Acropolis. It was small, Ionic, and perched on the edge of the cliff like a bird about to take flight. Inside stood a cult statue of Nike. Unlike every other image of the goddess, this one had no wings.

Pausanias records the explanation: the Athenians had removed Nike's wings so that victory could never fly away from their city. The temple was built around 420 BCE, when Athens had buried Pericles to plague and the Peloponnesian War ground on without resolution. They gave Nike a house on the highest ground and took her wings to keep her there.

Around 410 BCE, they ringed the bastion with a marble balustrade carved in shallow relief. Nike after Nike appeared on the stone: one leading a bull to sacrifice, another bending to unlace her sandal before stepping onto sacred ground. The marble has weathered, but the wings in stone remain.

In Stone and Gold

Phidias put Nike in the hands of gods. His chryselephantine Athena Parthenos stood forty feet tall inside the Parthenon, holding a figure of Nike six feet high in her outstretched right hand. At Olympia, his seated Zeus held another. Pausanias described both.

At Olympia too, the sculptor Paionios carved a Nike descending from the sky. The statue stood on a thirty-foot triangular pillar. From below, she seemed to hang in the air, her robes pressed against her body by the speed of her descent. The Messenians dedicated it after a victory over the Spartans around 421 BCE.

Philip II of Macedon stamped Nike on his gold staters. His son Alexander carried the image to Egypt and the Indus. Wherever the coins circulated, Nike's wings went with them.

The image that survived them all is the Winged Victory of Samothrace, carved around 190 BCE to commemorate a naval victory. Nike stands on the prow of a warship, wings spread wide, robes streaming in the wind. She is over ten feet tall on a base shaped like a ship's bow. The sea spray seems to catch her marble drapery. Two thousand years have taken her head and her arms. They could not take the motion. She leans forward into the wind, not yet landed, still in flight.