In lines 3–13 of Mesomedes’ Hymn to Nemesis (= Heitsch, Griech. Dichterfr., Mesomedes 3), the poet gives this impressive list of the goddess's characteristics:

You who restrain the empty snortings of mortals with an adamantine bit, and, hating the destructive hubris of men, you drive out dark envy. Beneath your wheel, ceaseless, trackless, the fierce fortune of mortals is ground down, and, escaping notice, you follow at men's heels, you force down the proud neck. You continually measure out life beneath your arm, you are forever nodding your eyes to your breast, mastering your ζυγόν with your hand.

I have deliberately left ζυγόν untranslated, for it is from this ambiguous noun that we will take our starting point. Two of the most prominent scholars to analyse this hymn have interpreted ζυγόν radically differently. According to Ewen Bowie in his survey of Antonine poetry, the word refers to the ‘balance’ or scales of justice with which Nemesis weighs men's fates.Footnote ² Tim Whitmarsh, on the other hand, believes that it refers to the ‘yoke’ of the chariot the goddess drives, and links the image to a wider leitmotif of deities as charioteers that he detects throughout Mesomedes’ hymnic poetry.Footnote ³

At first blush, the scales might seem to be heavily weighted (so to speak) in favour of Bowie. It is worth noting in this context that Nemesis, unlike Helios (the subject of another of Mesomedes’ hymns), is not traditionally depicted as a charioteer in antiquity; her many depictions in art show her seated or standing, but never (so far as I am aware) driving a vehicle.Footnote ⁴ Nor will suggestions that Nemesis was a patron goddess of the agôn, which might seem to bolster Whitmarsh's reading, hold water.Footnote ⁵

But in fact, I would argue, both Bowie and Whitmarsh are right. Throughout the hymn Mesomedes plays a complex literary game, blurring the lines between, on the one hand, the traditional popular and iconographic representation of Nemesis and, on the other, his own refiguration of the goddess as a charioteer. Deploying his considerable poetic talents and highly developed wit to great effect, he prevents the reader (or listener, assuming that the hymn was performed) from settling decisively on any one clear-cut understanding of the goddess's nature.Footnote ⁶

The game commences straight away, when the poet makes his least ambiguous allusion to the charioteer's art, speaking of an ‘adamantine bit’ with which the goddess restrains the ‘snortings’ of men. The image may have been foreign to artistic portrayals of Nemesis, but it is in no way out of keeping with the common understanding of the goddess; it is, after all, one of her most important roles in the cosmos to curb mortal hubris, as the following line states explicitly. Just as important, however, is the metaphor's function as a tone setter for the remainder of the poem; once the general analogy to charioteering is at work in the reader's mind, later terms that would otherwise have a straightforward referent to more traditional iconography take on an undercurrent of uncertainty.

The first of these is the goddess's wheel, τρόχος. In visual depictions of Nemesis, especially under the Empire, this wheel is nearly as ubiquitous as the more famous scales of justice; typically it sits at the goddess's foot.Footnote ⁷ Recent scholarship argues that the τρόχος is not to be understood as the infamous ‘wheel of fortune’, but rather as an instrument of punishment with which the goddess ‘grinds down’ mortal wrongdoing.Footnote ⁸ This is plausible enough although, characteristically, Mesomedes introduces μερόπων τύχα in order to muddy the waters as to precisely whose wheel this is and what it does.Footnote ⁹ But in the shadow of the ἀδάμας χαλινός, the reader/listener cannot help but be reminded of the wheels of a chariot racing around the track, always in motion (ἄστατος) and so swift as to leave no trace (ἀστιβής).

Mesomedes’ verbs of motion play upon the same ambiguity. It was proverbial that Nemesis is always at our heels, πὰρ πόδα; but in the charioteering context, it can be taken as a metaphor of pursuit on the racecourse.Footnote ¹⁰ So too it makes perfect sense that Nemesis, in her role as moral corrector, would ‘expel’ envy; but rather than the expected ἐξελαύνεις, Mesomedes gives us the independent preposition ἐκτός, followed by the simplex verb ἐλαύνεις – which can just as easily be used of ‘driving’ a chariot.Footnote ¹¹ This move may, admittedly, be simply metri gratia;Footnote ¹² but in the light of the other examples I have adduced, I am inclined to think there is a deeper subtext at work – not least because ἐλαύνεις is given special prominence by its position at the line end.

Lines 10–12 are a bit more complex. Each line in isolation can be understood to refer, once again, to one of Nemesis’ traditional attributes: the goddess ‘forces down the proud neck’ of mortals (effectively a restatement of her ‘curbing destructive hubris’); she ‘measures’– that is to say, weighs – men's lives ‘beneath her forearm’ in her scales;Footnote ¹³ she looks downward to examine those same scales. However, there are some distinct oddities here. Why the reference to a forearm (πῆχυς) in particular?Footnote ¹⁴ Why stress that the goddess ‘lowers her eyes to her bosom’?

In fact, all these mentions of individual body parts, when taken together, paint an impressionistic picture of a charioteer in action. It is precisely this bodily position that is depicted in iconographic representations of charioteering: the driver leans forward, his head lowered, his forearms raised and held out straight to support the reins.Footnote ¹⁵ The allusion may not seem obvious to the modern reader, but for a contemporary of Mesomedes, steeped in the world of chariot competition, the poet's intention would have been far more readily recognizable. We may imagine that as each line unfolded, the audience became more and more strongly influenced by the accumulation of appropriate imagery, not unlike the slow completion of a jigsaw puzzle.

At last we return to our ζυγόν. By the Roman period, the scales were perhaps Nemesis’ most recognizable iconographic attribute, frequently keeping company with the wheel;Footnote ¹⁶ and Mesomedes’ reference to the goddess as ‘measuring out life’ would have reinforced this understanding of ζυγόν as uppermost in his audience's minds. But the word's basic denotation, as Whitmarsh saw, is a ‘yoke’; and by this point in the poem, with the reader or listener hopelessly at sea as to whether or not Mesomedes intends to echo Nemesis’ traditional iconography, this principal definition is placed in vibrant tension with the ‘scales of justice’. The goddess both is and is not the administrator of justice with feet planted firmly on the ground, just as she is and is not the charioteer at the reins of a yoke team of mortals.

Why does Mesomedes play such a game? Perhaps he is making some profound theological statement about the ambivalence of Nemesis’ role in the cosmos – but I doubt it. More likely his aim is sheer pleasure – his own and his audience's. If, as is often said, the root of humour is the subversion of expectations, then Mesomedes’ second-century readers or listeners, finding their traditional conceptions of Nemesis challenged and subverted, may well have recognized in this seemingly serious hymn a certain amusing jeu d'esprit. This need not necessarily mean that Mesomedes was lacking in genuine ‘religious feeling’ (however one wishes to define that); piety and wry humour are not mutually exclusive attitudes.

If there is any lesson we should take away from this exercise, it is a new appreciation for Mesomedes’ poetic skill. It has been said of Shakespeare's sonnets that ‘the combination of apparent simplicity and demonstrable difficulty is perhaps [their] commonest trait’;Footnote ¹⁷ while I would not claim that Mesomedes was the Shakespeare of his time, he too is a richer artist than he appears at first glance.