Astraia comes from Greek mythology and means star-maiden, the goddess of justice linked with the stars.
Astraia (also Astraea) is one of the great mythological names of the classical world. In Greek tradition, she was the goddess of justice and innocence, daughter of the Titan Astraeus (god of the dusk) and Eos (goddess of the dawn) — or in some accounts, of Zeus and Themis. She lived among mortals during the Golden Age, when humanity was uncorrupted, but as the ages declined into bronze and iron, she was the last of the immortals to abandon the earth.
She rose to the heavens and became the constellation Virgo, carrying her scales of justice with her as the neighboring constellation Libra. Her name derives from the Greek "astron" (star), making her literally a star-maiden. The name carried immense resonance in Renaissance literature.
Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, long interpreted as a prophecy of a new golden age, invokes the "return of the Virgin" — widely understood as Astraea's return to earth as justice is restored. Edmund Spenser used Astraea as a figure for Queen Elizabeth I in the Shepheardes Calender, and she reappears throughout seventeenth-century pastoral literature as an idealized embodiment of both feminine virtue and political justice. Aphra Behn, the pioneering English playwright and novelist, used "Astrea" as her pen name.
In the modern era, the name has experienced a quiet resurgence among parents drawn to classical mythology and celestial naming traditions. The variant spelling Astraia preserves the original Greek transliteration and gives the name a slightly more archaic, scholarly quality. Its associations — justice, starlight, the waning of innocence, the beauty of a golden age — give it a depth that purely invented or trend-driven names rarely achieve.