Everyone knows the word. Almost no one knows the goddess.
Say "nemesis" today and you mean an enemy, the rival who finally brings you down. To the Greeks she was stranger and far more frightening: a goddess who watched your good fortune, weighed your pride, and cut down anyone who climbed too high. Let slip that life was going well, and you might spit into your own robe to stop her noticing.
The book follows her across three thousand years, from a lonely sanctuary at the edge of Attica to the amphitheatres of Rome, the wheel of medieval Fortune, and the pages of a modern newspaper. Along the way are the boastful kings and queens she ruined, and the marble statue said to be cut from stone the Persians shipped to Greece for a victory they never won. Philosophers dissolved her into a law of the cosmos. Modern neuroscientists, scanning envy in the brain, found her again.
She began as a whisper of warning at a dinner table and ended as a household word. What she stood for never left us: the suspicion that no run of luck is free, and that somewhere the account is still being kept.
