Dike

Dike (δίκη) is the Greek word for justice — at once legal, moral, and cosmic, and the cosmic ordering principle that distinguishes the Zeus-order from the prior sovereignties of Ouranos and Kronos. In Hesiod’s Works and Days and in the theogony, Dike is personified as the daughter of Zeus who reports human injustice to her father. Sullivan gives the passage: “Justice is of great concern to Zeus. She is his daughter. He listens to reports of injustice, himself observing as well perverse human behaviour and sending many watchers to observe human beings. Zeus rewards those who are just and punishes the unjust not only individually, but both as a family and as members of a city” (Sullivan 1995, p. 186, paraphrasing Works and Days 277–285).

Dike is not a convention. She is a power of the divine order, built into the structure of the cosmos. Her antithesis is hubris, overreach that violates the limits set by the gods. jean-pierre-vernant reads the myth of the five races as a cycle whose poles are pure Dike and pure hubris: the age of gold is “the reign of pure dike”; the end of the age of iron will be “the reign of pure hubris” (Vernant 1983, p. 60).

Sullivan draws the genealogical point: Dike is Zeus’s daughter, and therefore “itself partaking of the divine nature. In relation to the chief god, Zeus, this Justice is described as daughter: it is thus something, or rather, ‘someone’ whom he will care for and heed” (Sullivan 1995). Sullivan’s analysis also makes the structural point: the earlier sky-fathers — Ouranos and Kronos — were unjust; they devoured or imprisoned their offspring. Zeus’s sovereignty is stabilized precisely because he institutes justice, allows his children their honors, and governs by distribution rather than devouring. Dike is therefore the principle that ends the cycle of violent succession — the Hesiodic answer to the puer-senex pattern, and the classical ground on which Plato’s Republic will later build. Hillman’s recovery of the senex as potentially generative rather than only tyrannous takes its classical cue from Hesiodic dike.

Relationships

• hubris
• myth-of-the-races
• works-and-days
• harrison-themis
• succession-myth
• theogony
• moira-thread
• logos

Primary sources

• works-and-days (Hesiod, c. 700 BCE, lines 213–285)
• sullivan-psychological-ethical-ideas (Sullivan 1995)
• vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)
• theogony (Hesiod)