Themis: Titaness of Justice and Goddess of Law

Themis was the Titaness of Justice and the Goddess of Law, a daughter of Gaia and the elder sister of Mnemosyne. Among all the Titans she embodied divine order, law, and custom, and it was said that she gave her race a purpose to be a part of the world. She served Cronos without sharing his cruelty, foretold his ruin at the hands of his own child, and when the Great War came she refused to raise her hand against either side, choosing instead to stand with Zeus and his new pantheon. Her reward was godhood, a place at the side of the king of Olympus, and, in the end, the same prison that swallowed the kin she had abandoned, for when she condemned Zeus for his treatment of the defeated Titans she was cast into Tartarus beside her sister.

The embodiment of divine order#

Themis was born from Gaia along with her younger sister Mnemosyne, and where her sister became the living memory of the world, Themis became its conscience. She was the embodiment of divine order, law, and custom, the power that separated the just from the unjust and held the forces of the world in balance. What she represented was not the ordinance of mortal kings but natural law itself, the deeper order that even gods were bound to answer. Through her, the Titans were given a purpose to be a part of the world, a place within an order larger than their own strength.

To this was joined the gift of sight. Themis could look upon the past of every being and foresee what was to come, and among the elder race she was counted the Titan Goddess of Order and Justice, one of the great powers of the first age of the world.

In the service of Cronos#

The first age ended in patricide. Cronos rose against his father Ouranos and slew him, and in the reign that followed Themis was among the Titans who became his close allies. She pledged herself to the new king of the Titans, yet she never agreed with his cruel methods, and her loyalty did not blind her sight.

It was Themis who prophesied that the downfall of Cronos would be caused by one of his own children. The warning drove the Titan king to horror rather than wisdom. He devoured his children as they were born, all except the last, for Rhea deceived him with a stone wrapped in cloth and hid the infant away. That child was Zeus, and when he came of age he freed his brothers and sisters from their father's belly, exactly as the justice Themis embodied had foretold.

The Great War#

The freed children of Cronos declared themselves the Olympians and made war upon the Titans. Themis did not take part in the Titanomachy. Like her sister Mnemosyne she refused to fight, and instead of standing with her own kind she allied herself with Zeus and his newly established pantheon. She was not alone in that choice. Themis, Iris, and Mnemosyne, as well as Queen Rhea, were among the female Titans who defected and joined the Olympians while the war tore the world apart.

When the fighting ended and the Titans lay defeated, the victors banished their elders to Tartarus. Themis, who had never lifted a weapon against Olympus, was spared that first judgment. She was granted the status of a goddess and took her place within the order of the new pantheon.

Lover of Zeus#

In the age that followed the war, Themis became a lover of Zeus and bore him children. Some accounts went further and named the Sisters of Fate themselves, the Moirai who measured and cut the threads of every life, as daughters of Themis, binding the goddess of justice to the very powers that ruled destiny. Whatever the truth of her line, her closeness to the king of the gods placed her at the heart of Olympus in the years of its triumph.

It did not last. The justice that had once condemned Cronos now turned its gaze on his son. Themis did not agree with a Zeus who cared only for control and power over the mortal world, and she disapproved of his cruel treatment of the Titans, whom he stripped of their roles and denied all of their rights. The defeated race she had abandoned in war she now defended in judgment, and the king of Olympus did not forgive it.

The fall into Tartarus#

For refusing to support Zeus's thirst for revenge upon the Titans, Themis was imprisoned in Tartarus, and her sister Mnemosyne was condemned alongside her. Even the female Titans who had stayed neutral in the Great War came to the pit in time, Rhea and Themis chief among them, so that the ally, the mother, and the judge of the Olympians shared at last the punishment of the enemies they had never joined. Typhon, himself chained beneath a frozen mountain, named her among the Titans who had been banished to Tartarus.

Her fall carried a bitter symmetry. The goddess whose whole being was law and fairness was condemned without either, not for rebellion but for dissent, and the order she had given the world survived on Olympus only as the will of Zeus.

The statue at Delos and the last wars#

The mortal world remembered her. Near the island of Delos a truly enormous Statue of Themis was constructed in her honor by Archimedes, a colossus standing in the waters of the Aegean as a monument to justice in an age that was steadily forgetting it.

Themis herself never returned to the wars of gods and Titans. When Gaia pleaded the cause of Kratos, the fallen Ghost of Sparta, as a powerful warrior and a worthy ally of the Titans, Themis was named among those who agreed, alongside Iapetus, Hyperion, and Rhea. Yet when Kratos reached back through time and freed the Titans to scale Olympus and exact their vengeance, she did not aid them. Neither she nor Mnemosyne fought in the Second Titanomachy, and when the Spartan himself passed through the depths of Tartarus, the Titaness of Justice was nowhere to be seen. Whether she still endured in the pit while Olympus burned above, no record told.