Her family is the most interesting thing about her and almost nobody knows it. Hesiod makes Nike the daughter of the Titan Pallas and of Styx — the river of the underworld by which the gods swear their unbreakable oaths — and gives her three siblings whose names are a job description for divine enforcement: Zelus (rivalry), Kratos (power) and Bia (force).
When Zeus called for allies against the Titans, Styx came first, bringing her children, and Zeus honoured her by making her water the oath of the gods and kept her children permanently at his side. That is a political arrangement: victory is not a free-floating good but a retainer of the ruling regime, quartered next to Power and Force. Kratos and Bia are the two who nail Prometheus to the rock in the opening scene of Prometheus Bound, and Nike is their sister.
An attribute more than a goddess
She has essentially no myths of her own, and in art she is usually held by somebody else. The chryselephantine Zeus at Olympia held a Nike in his right hand; the Athena Parthenos held one about two metres tall in her palm, which is roughly life-size for a statue held by a statue. She flies in to crown victors, drives chariots, leads sacrificial bulls, pours libations, and erects trophies. Where a Greek relief shows a winged woman doing something ceremonial, it is almost always her.
This is a real category in Greek religion — a personification that is worshipped without being a character — and it is easy to underrate. Victory in war and in the games was understood as something conferred, not achieved, and the goddess in the general's or athlete's hand is a statement about who gets the credit.
The wingless Nike, and the temple on the bastion
The small Ionic temple of Athena Nike on the bastion at the entrance to the Acropolis, built in the 420s BCE, is a deliberate political object. The cult it housed was of Athena in her victory aspect, and Pausanias reports that the image was wingless — Nike Apteros — and explains that the Athenians made it so in order that Victory would never leave the city.
Around the bastion ran a parapet of relief sculpture showing dozens of Nikai setting up trophies, leading bulls and adjusting their clothing. The best-known slab, the so-called Sandal-Binder, shows a winged figure bending to fasten her sandal, the drapery clinging in a way that made it one of the most copied works of the fifth century BCE.
The temple has been dismantled and rebuilt more times than any other ancient Greek building: taken apart by the Ottomans in the 1680s to build a gun emplacement, reassembled in 1834–35 after independence, dismantled and reassembled again in 1935–40, and once more in 2000–2010 to replace corroding iron clamps.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace
The other great Nike is the one in the Louvre. Found on Samothrace in 1863 by the French vice-consul Charles Champoiseau, missing its head and arms, it stands about 2.4 metres and was mounted on a marble prow of a ship, set in a sanctuary basin. It is generally dated to the early second century BCE and is thought to commemorate a naval victory, probably Rhodian, though the occasion is not certain.
What makes it extraordinary is the wet drapery blown flat against the body and streaming behind, and the fact that it was designed to be seen with water and light around it. A right hand, found in 1950, is displayed nearby; the open palm suggests she was not holding a wreath but raising the hand in a gesture of announcement. It has been at the top of the Daru staircase in the Louvre since 1884, and it is the single most-reproduced piece of Hellenistic sculpture in existence.
Victoria, and the Roman difference
The Roman Victoria had a genuine state cult and a political significance Nike never quite had in Greece. The Altar of Victory in the Senate house, with a statue Augustus brought from Tarentum, was where senators burned incense before business. Its removal by Gratian in 382 CE produced one of the sharpest documented exchanges of late antiquity: the pagan prefect Symmachus petitioned for its restoration in a famous appeal arguing that so great a mystery cannot be reached by one road alone, and Ambrose of Milan wrote against him. The altar was not restored.
Victoria appears on Roman coinage for centuries, usually with wreath and palm, and passed almost seamlessly into Christian iconography — the winged victory becoming the winged angel is one of the clearest cases of visual continuity across the religious change.
The swoosh
In 1971 a small Oregon athletic-shoe company then called Blue Ribbon Sports needed a name; an employee, Jeff Johnson, is said to have suggested Nike after a dream. The logo, designed by a graphic-design student, Carolyn Davidson, for a fee of thirty-five dollars, was intended to evoke a wing.
The result is that the most commercially recognised Greek deity in the world is a goddess with no myths, whose mother is the river of oaths and whose siblings are Power and Force. The company's Greek pronunciation is also, incidentally, the correct one, which puts it ahead of most classical borrowings.
Wings, trophies, and Athena Nike
Athena Nike: one goddess or two?
No, but they overlap deliberately. Athena Nike is Athena in a victory aspect, worshipped at the Acropolis temple; Nike as an independent goddess is Styx's daughter. Greek religion handled this kind of relationship constantly — a major deity absorbs a personification as an epithet without the personification ceasing to exist separately. Zeus also appears as Zeus Nikephoros, victory-bringing.
Why does she have wings when most Greek deities do not?
Winged figures in Greek art are generally beings that arrive: Iris, Eros, the winds, Hypnos, the Erinyes, and Nike. Wings signal function rather than status. Victory comes to a person from outside — this is exactly the theological point — and the wings say so.
What is a trophy, originally?
A tropaion, from the word for the turning-point where an enemy broke and ran. The Greeks set up captured armour on a post or a tree at that spot after a battle, and Nike is repeatedly shown in the act of erecting one. The modern trophy cabinet descends by a direct line from a suit of a dead enemy's armour nailed to a stake on a battlefield.
Are there other named victory personifications?
Several minor ones, and the Greeks were comfortable multiplying them: Agon (contest), Eris' opposite in the good sense of competition, and the personified spirits of specific games. More significant is the way Nike merges with Tyche (fortune) and with civic personifications in the Hellenistic period, when cities began to be represented as crowned women receiving or bestowing victory — the visual grammar that eventually produces Britannia, Marianne and Columbia.