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.