Domain: Fortune, chance, luck — and the fate of cities Symbol: The rudder, the wheel, the cornucopia, the mural crown of a city's walls Roman Equivalent: Fortuna
Overview
Tyche is the goddess of fortune and chance — the power behind everything that could have gone otherwise. Where a Greek could not trace an event to skill, to justice, or to the clear will of a named god, he laid it to Tyche: the windfall and the ruin, the ship that came home and the one that did not. Her parentage was told variously, sometimes as a daughter of Oceanus, sometimes of Zeus, sometimes counted among the older powers of chance — fitting for a goddess whose whole nature is that things need not have been as they are. She rose to real prominence in the Hellenistic age, when the old certainties had loosened and the sense that life turned on luck grew strong enough to need a face.
Her emblems say exactly what she is. She holds a rudder, because she steers the affairs of the world; a ball or a wheel, because fortune rolls and never rests where it lies; a cornucopia, because she pours out plenty on whom she pleases. Above all she became the tutelary spirit of the city — the Tyche of Antioch, of Alexandria, of a hundred towns — crowned with the ring of a city's walls, the luck of the place made into a goddess who could be honoured, courted, and feared. Blindfold or blithe, she gives and takes without reckoning of desert, and that indifference is the whole of her lesson.
Key Myths
The luck of the city. In the Hellenistic world every great city had its own Tyche — a guardian fortune personifying the collective luck of the place, its prosperity and its survival. The famous Tyche of Antioch, cast in bronze, sat crowned with the city's towered walls, a sheaf of grain in her hand and the river-god of the Orontes swimming at her feet: the fate of a whole people made visible as a seated goddess. To honour her was to pray that the city's luck would hold.
The rudder and the wheel. Tyche's tools are her myth. The rudder marks her as the steersman of human affairs, turning lives to good or ill; the wheel and the rolling ball mark how little that steering can be trusted, since fortune's motion is ceaseless and shows no favour. The Greeks held her in a kind of wary respect — not loved as the bright gods were loved, but reckoned with, because no plan and no virtue could finally out-argue the throw of chance she governed.
Related
- Fortuna — Her Roman self, whose wheel and cornucopia carry the same meaning
- Wheel of Fortune — The Major Arcana card of her exact domain: the turning wheel, rise and fall, fate's indifference
- Nike — The complement to chance: victory that is earned in the contest rather than given by luck
- Zeus — Named in some accounts as her father, the sky-king above all outcomes
- Mythology
- Greek Mythology Index