Variant of Astraea, the Greek star maiden and goddess of justice.
Astrea comes directly from the Greek *astraia*, the feminine form of *astraios*, meaning 'of the stars' — a root it shares with astronomy, astral, and disaster (literally 'ill-starred'). In Greek mythology, Astraea was the goddess of justice and innocent purity, daughter of Zeus and Themis (or, in some accounts, of the Titan Astraeus and the dawn goddess Eos). During the Golden Age she walked among mortals, but as human virtue declined through the Silver and Bronze Ages she retreated further until, when the Iron Age brought war and wickedness, she became the last immortal to abandon Earth.
The gods placed her in the sky as the constellation Virgo, her scales of justice becoming the adjacent Libra. This myth gave Astrea an extraordinarily rich literary afterlife. The seventeenth-century French pastoral romance *L'Astrée* by Honoré d'Urfé was the longest novel of its era and made Astrée a byword for ideal love.
In England, the Restoration playwright and novelist Aphra Behn — one of the first professional female writers — used *Astrea* as her pen name, charging it with associations of wit and independence. Edmund Spenser evoked the figure in *The Faerie Queene*, and the name recurs across Renaissance and Baroque poetry as a symbol of justice returning to earth. Modern parents drawn to Astrea are typically reaching for this layered constellation of meaning: starlight, justice, purity, and a mythology that rewards the curious. It sits elegantly beside names like Aurora, Calliope, and Thessaly — classical without feeling antique.