[7] The 2nd-century geographer Pausanias, reports seeing a statue of Adrasteia in a temple of Apollo, Artemis, and Leto at Cirrha, near Delphi.
[10] Adrasteia gave Zeus a wondrous toy ball to play with, later used by Aphrodite to bribe her son Eros.
[19] The explicit identification of the two goddesses is first found in the writings of the late fifth-century BC poet and grammarian Antimachus of Colophon.
[21] The land of the Berecyntians, where a fragment of Aeschylus' lost play Niobe locates the cult of Adrasteia, was also the home of Ephesian Artemis.
[36] The Phoronis describes Adrasteia as a mountain goddess, whose servants were the Idaean Dactyls, Phrygian "wizards (γόητες) of Ida", who were the first to discover iron and iron working:[37] Aeschylus' Niobe fragment mentions the "territory of Adrasteia" associating it with the Berecyntians, a Phrygian tribe, and Mount Ida:[39] Once in the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound, and twice in the Euripidean Rhesus, Adrasteia is invoked as a ward against the consequences of boastful speech (perhaps here being identified with Nemesis as the punisher of boasts).
[46] The geographer Strabo quotes Antimachus as saying: In a similar vein to the Aeschylean and Euripidean invocations, Plato, in his Republic (c. 375 BC), has Socrates invoke Arasteia (i.e.
as a ward against divine retribution for—not a boast—but rather an eccentric idea:[48] Plato (followed by the early Stoics) also equates Adrasteia with Fate, as the judge of reincarnating souls:[50] Both the early 3rd-century BC poet Callimachus, and the mid 3rd-century BC poet Apollonius of Rhodes, name Adrasteia as a nurse of the infant Zeus.
[51] According to Callimachus, Adrasteia, along with the ash-tree nymphs, the Meliae, laid Zeus "to rest in a cradle of gold", and fed him with honeycomb, and the milk of the goat Amaltheia.
[52] Apollonius of Rhodes, describes a wondrous toy ball which Adrasteia gave the child Zeus, when she was his nurse in the "Idean cave".
[56] Several possible Orphic sources contain accounts of Zeus being nursed by Adrasteia and Ida (here the daughters of Mellissos and Amalthea) and guarded by the Curetes.