Deities
Tyche
Greek Deities
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Tyche is the Greek goddess of fortune, chance and the prosperity of a city, whose worship rose to prominence in the Hellenistic age as belief in an unpredictable fate deepened. Reckoned a daughter of Oceanus or of Zeus, she is shown crowned with city walls, holding a cornucopia and a rudder with which she steers the affairs of the world, or balanced on a wheel or a ball to mark how easily she tips. Each great city had its own Tyche, the most famous the Tyche of Antioch by Eutychides. Her Roman counterpart is Fortuna.
Facts
Function
Domain / Function Attestation
Era of Attestation Veneration TodayHistorically attested; no continuous cult 1 HistoricityNot a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 2 Attributions
Mythic AssociationGoddess of fortune and chance, whose cult grew markedly in the Hellenistic period as cities adopted her as their own personified luck, each city typically giving her a distinct city-wall crown. 2 History
Historical NoteReckoned a daughter of Oceanus or of Zeus, she is shown crowned with city walls, holding a cornucopia and a rudder with which she steers the affairs of the world, or balanced on a wheel or a ball to mark how easily she tips; her Roman counterpart is Fortuna. 1 Belief
TheologyPolytheistic: many gods 1 Origins
Origin of the NameTyche is the ordinary Greek word for fortune, luck or chance, a deified abstraction in the same pattern as Nike, victory, or Eros, desire. 1 Cult
Attributes and IconographyTyche is shown crowned with a city's walls, holding a cornucopia in one hand and a ship's rudder in the other, or balanced on a rolling wheel or ball to mark how quickly fortune turns; the most celebrated example is the Tyche of Antioch made by Eutychides. 1 Learn More
The Goddess of a More Uncertain Age
Tyche is the goddess of fortune and chance, the good or ill luck that falls to a person or, above all, to a city. Her rise to real prominence belongs to the Hellenistic period, the centuries after Alexander, when the old certainties of the city-state gave way to larger and less predictable kingdoms and people felt their lives more openly at the mercy of forces they could not control. In that mood Tyche came into her own, worshipped as the guardian fortune of one city after another.
The most celebrated image was the Tyche of Antioch, a seated bronze by the sculptor Eutychides showing the goddess crowned with the city's walls, a sheaf of grain in her hand and the river-god of the Orontes swimming at her feet. That mural crown, the cornucopia of plenty and sometimes a ship's rudder or a wheel became her regular attributes, marking her as the power that steers events and turns the wheel of prosperity. Rome knew her as Fortuna.
A Point in the Sky Named for the Goddess
Long after her cult statues stopped being carved, Tyche survived inside a technical apparatus far removed from temple ritual: Hellenistic and later astrology. The Lot of Fortune, known in Greek as the Kleros tes Tyches and in Latin as the Pars Fortunae, is not a planet or a star but a calculated point in a horoscope, derived by measuring the zodiacal distance between the Sun and Moon and projecting that same distance from the rising degree, with the exact formula reversed for charts cast at night. Astrologers such as Vettius Valens, writing his lengthy Anthology in the second century CE, gave the Lot of Fortune sustained treatment as a marker of a native's material fortune, health, and bodily life, treating Tyche's old civic role as protector of prosperity as something a mathematician could now locate at a precise degree rather than something a city petitioned with sacrifice. Claudius Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, more skeptical of the proliferating lots that later astrologers multiplied by the dozen, still retained the Lot of Fortune as one of the few worth calculating, a rare point of agreement across an otherwise contentious astrological literature.
The abstraction is a telling one: Tyche the sculpted, city crowned goddess of the Hellenistic squares became, in this parallel tradition, a piece of arithmetic embedded in the horoscope itself, and the Lot of Fortune remains in use among astrologers working in the Hellenistic revival today, an unbroken thread of technical practice considerably older than her more famous statues.
Correspondences & Relations
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Tyche directly: "API record for "Bronze statuette of Tyche (Good Fortune)," a Roman bronze of the 1st century CE, acquired through the Rogers Fund in 1913."
Child Of
Tyche is named in the roll of the daughters born to Oceanus and Tethys.
Tyche is named in the roll of the daughters born to Oceanus and Tethys.
Depicted In
The Met's own title for this statuette names the subject outright, "Bronze statuette of Tyche (Good Fortune)," a narrative identification rather than a bare tag.
Interpretatio Of
Interpretatio romana: Greek Tyche identified with Roman Fortuna, goddess of chance and fortune.
Worshipped In
Sources
1. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition
Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2012s.v. TycheView the Source 2. Greek Religion
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1985On the Hellenistic rise of Tyche and the Tyche of AntiochView the Source 2. Greek Religion
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1985Tyche and Hellenistic religionView the Source Theogony
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. Tyche / FortunaView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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