Why Is Justice Personified as a Woman Holding a Set of Scales?

Chances are at some point you’ve seen a statue or painting depicting the personification of the concept of justice as a woman holding a set of scales in one hand (usually her left) and an unsheathed sword in her other hand (usually her right), often wearing a blindfold over her eyes. Statues depicting Justice in this manner often stand outside courthouses across Europe and the Americas. Many people have wondered why she is personified as a woman and some have tried to attribute great allegorical or symbolic significance to her gender. Some have imagined, for instance, that maybe men find women desirable and men created the personification of Justice, so they made her a woman to show that Justice is desirable. This may sound like a compelling and common-sense answer, but it is still wrong.

In reality, Justice is personified as a woman not for any profound allegorical or symbolic reason, but rather simply because the respective nouns denoting the concept of “justice” in the Ancient Greek and Latin languages happen to be grammatically feminine. In this post, I will discuss the origin of the personification Justice and the history of how she came to have the standard iconography that she has today.

The ancient Greek divine personifications of justice

In the Ancient Greek language, a noun can have any of three possible grammatical genders, which are: feminine, masculine, and neuter. The ancient Greeks often personified abstract concepts as deities. When they did this, they generally used the noun that denoted the concept as the name for the deity and kept the gender of the deity the same as the grammatical gender of the noun they personified. Thus, if the noun denoting the concept was grammatically masculine, the divine personification would be a male god and, if the noun was grammatically feminine, the divine personification would be a goddess.

There are a few divine personifications in Greek mythology that are male, such as Ζῆλος (Zêlos), the divine personification of envy or emulation, and Κράτος (Krátos), the divine personification of strength, power, or authority. (I discuss the divine personification Kratos and his appearances in ancient Greek literature at great length in this post I wrote in March 2020.) Most nouns denoting abstract concepts in Ancient Greek, however, are grammatically feminine. This includes both of the most common nouns for “justice.”

The word θέμις (thémis), a third-declension feminine noun, typically refers to primordial, divinely-established justice. Meanwhile, the word δίκη (díkē), a first-declension feminine noun, typically refers to justice based on human laws, institutions, and jurisprudence. Because both of these nouns are grammatically feminine, the ancient Greeks personified both concepts as goddesses: the goddess Themis and the goddess Dike.

The ancient Greek poet Hesiodos of Askre, who most likely flourished in around the early seventh century BCE and whose poems are considered to be among the oldest in the Greek language that have survived to the present day, relates the two concepts together by describing Dike as the daughter of Themis and the god Zeus, along with a whole host of other divine personifications, in his Theogonia 901–906. He declares:

“δεύτερον ἠγάγετο λιπαρὴν Θέμιν, ἣ τέκεν Ὥρας,
Εὐνουμίην τε Δίκην τε καὶ Εἰρήνην τεθαλυῖαν,
αἳ ἔργ᾽ ὠρεύουσι καταθνητοῖσι βροτοῖσι,
Μοίρας θ᾽, ᾗ πλείστην τιμὴν πόρε μητίετα Ζεύς,
Κλωθώ τε Λάχεσίν τε καὶ Ἄτροπον, αἵτε διδοῦσι
θνητοῖς ἀνθρώποισιν ἔχειν ἀγαθόν τε κακόν τε.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Next he [i.e., Zeus] married shining Themis, who bore the Horai [the “Seasons”]:
Eunomia [“Good Order”], Dike [“Justice”], and burgeoning Eirene [“Peace”],
who attend to the deeds of mortal humans,
and the Moirai [“Fates”], to whom counselor Zeus gave the most honor:
Klotho and Lachesis and Atropos, who give
to mortal human beings both the good thing and the bad thing to have.”

The ancient Greeks often imagined both Dike and Themis as holding a set of scales, which represent the weighing of evidence in favor of competing arguments. The ancient Greek lyric poet Bakchylides (lived c. 518 – c. 451 BCE) makes the earliest known reference to Dike having a set of scales in his Epinikos 4.11–13. There, he declares:

“ἔτι δὲ τέ]τρατον, εἴ τις ὀρθὰ
θεὸς] εἷλκε Δίκας τάλαν[τα,
Δεινομένεός κ᾿ ἐγερα[ίρ]ομεν υἱόν.”

This means, in my own translation:

“But still, if some deity had held correctly
the scales of Dike,
then a fourth time we would be honoring the son of Deinomenes.”

The most famous surviving ancient Greek artistic depiction of Themis is a Pentelic marble statue made by the sculptor Chairestratos son of Charedemos sometime around 300 BCE or thereabouts that was discovered at the site of Rhamnous in 1890 and is now held in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Themis’s left hand in the statue is believed to have originally held a set of scales, but the scales themselves have not survived. Her right hand, which is broken off, is believed to have originally held a phiale, a kind of bowl meant for pouring offerings to the deities.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an ancient Greek Pentelic marble statue of the goddess Themis dating to c. 300 BCE, found at the site of Rhamnous, now held in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens

The Roman personification Iūstitia

The word for “justice” in Latin is the first-declension feminine noun iūstitia. The ancient Romans therefore adopted the Greek divine personification Dike and gave her the Latin name Iūstitia. The ancient Romans regularly depicted Iūstitia as holding a set of scales in one hand, representing the symbolic weighing of competing arguments, and a cornucopia in the other, representing the abundance and prosperity that come through justice.

The Romans also personified the word aequitās, which is a third-declension feminine noun meaning “evenness,” “equity,” or “impartiality,” as a goddess with more-or-less identical iconography to Iūstitia. Both Iūstitia and Aequitās appear frequently on imperial Roman coins, sometimes with the exact same iconography in the exact same position, indicating that the two goddesses were seen as basically interchangeable, if not identical.

ABOVE: Photos showing the obverse (left) and reverse (right) of a silver denarius minted at some point between 193 and 194 CE by the Roman emperor Pescennius Niger, depicting the goddess Iūstitia on the reverse holding a set of scales and a cornucopia

Iūstitia in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

Although the Roman Empire gradually converted to Christianity over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, writers and artists continued to use the personification of Iūstitia as a woman holding a set of scales and this is the source for the modern western personification of Justice. By the Late Middle Ages, it was standard to depict her holding a set of scales in one hand (usually her left) and an unsheathed sword in the other (usually her right), representing the enforcement of justice through state-sanctioned violence.

The oldest known depiction of Justice wearing a blindfold is a satirical woodcut illustration, possibly made by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, published in 1494 in the book Das Narrenschiff or The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant. Contrary to the modern celebratory portrayal of Justice wearing a blindfold to indicate her objective impartiality, in the illustration in Brant’s book, the blindfold is clearly meant as a critique—portraying Justice as blind to the rampant iniquity taking place all around her.

ABOVE: Satirical woodcut illustration printed in 1494 in Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff of Ship of Fools, the oldest known depiction of Justice wearing a blindfold

Other artists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made other interesting innovations in their portrayals of Justice. For instance, although most artists of this period depicted Justice as fully clothed, the eminent German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (lived c. 1472 – 1553) made not one, but two different paintings depicting Justice as basically completely naked.

In both paintings, Justice wears only elaborate jewelry and a nearly invisible gossamer gown. The gossamer gown is most likely an attempt on Cranach’s part to appease the moral sensibilities of his time, which held that “respectable” women should never be depicted fully nude, while still fulfilling his own desire to paint Justice as a naked goddess.

ABOVE: Justice as a Naked Woman with a Sword and Balance, painted in 1537 by the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder

Cranach’s portrayal of Justice as naked does not seem to have caught on—but, for whatever reason, the portrayal from Brant’s Narrenschiff of Justice wearing a blindfold did.

The oldest surviving statue depicting Justice wearing a blindfold as an apparent celebration of the law’s impartiality is the statue made by the Swiss sculptor Hans Gieng in around 1543, which stood atop the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen or Fountain of Justice in Bern, Switzerland, for over four hundred years. Some vandals destroyed Gieng’s original statue in 1986, so the statue that stands atop the fountain today is an exact modern replica of his original.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the modern replica of Hans Gieng’s statue of Justice atop the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen or Fountain of Justice in Bern, Switzerland

Conclusion: the personification Justice today

Modern artistic depictions of Justice nearly always depict her holding a set of scales and an unsheathed sword, which are the oldest attributes associated with her that are still a consistent part of her modern iconography, but they vary whether they show her wearing a blindfold.

Unlike medieval and early modern depictions of Justice, modern depictions usually show her in classicizing attire, deliberately harkening back to her origin as a Greek and Roman goddess. Some depictions show her wearing a Greek chiton, while others show her wearing a stola, the type of dress normally worn by married Roman women. Some statues also depict her wearing a cloak over her dress.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a statue of Justice wearing a blindfold, a belted Roman stola, and a cloak outside the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong (left) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a statue of Justice wearing a belted Greek chiton without a blindfold or cloak outside the Supreme Court of Queensland in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia (right)