Níkē in Later Traditions
The Romans identified Níkē with Victoria, whose name gives English 'victory' and whose cult — an altar on the Palatine attributed to Evander (Virgil, Aeneid 8.337–341), a temple vowed in 294 BCE (Livy 10.33) — made triumph a state sacrament. The winged figure was borrowed back into Christian iconography, where Victoria's stance and wings shaped the earliest angels of the sarcophagi; the Byzantines translated her into the city's protectress. In the modern West she became a secular emblem of achievement — the Brescian Victory (382 CE), the Samothracian Nike herself, the French Revolution's and the Olympic movement's winged figures. The Greek name survives most loudly in a modern sportswear brand, but the older idea survives better: that triumph is a divine, not merely human, event — and that it must be honored precisely because it cannot be kept.