t in the running
of the universe. It is very much our way of thinking of her, and of
course both our own concept and the later Roman concept go back to
Greece. But Greece had not always had this idea of the goddess of luck.
The older purer age of Greek thought was permeated with the idea of the
absolute immutable character of the divine will, a belief which
precluded the possibility of chance or caprice. The earliest Greek Tyche
(Fortuna) was the daughter of Zeus who fulfilled his will; and that his
will through her was often a beneficent will is shown in the tendency to
think of her as a goddess of plenty. It was only the growth of
scepticism, the failure of faith to bear up under the apparently
contradictory lessons of experience, which brought into being in the
Alexandrian age Tyche, the goddess of chance, the winged capricious
deity poised on the ball. It was this habit of thought which eventually
gave the Romans that idea of Fortuna which has became our idea because
it is the prevalent one in Roman literature and life in the periods with
which we are most familiar. Now if Fortuna be thought of in this latter
way, it is a very easy matter to connect her with Servius Tullius, for
the legendary accounts of Servius's career picture him as a very child
of "fortune," raised from the lowest estate to the highest power, the
little slave boy who became king. What goddess would he delight to
honour, if not the goddess of the happy chance which had made him what
he was?

All this is very pretty, but it is unfortunately quite impossible,
because whatever the time may have been when Fortuna began to be
worshipped in Rome, it is certain that the idea of chance did not enter
into the concept of her until long after Servius's day. Instead the
early Fortuna was a goddess of plenty and fertility, among mankind as a
protectress of women and of childbirth, among the crops and the herds as
a goddess of fertility and fecundity. Her full name was probably Fors
Fortuna, a name which survived in two old temples across the river from
Rome proper, in Trastevere, where she was worshipped in the country by
the farmers in behalf of the crops. Fortuna is thus merely the cult-name
added to the old goddess Fors to intensify her meaning, which finally
broke off from her and became independent, expressing the same idea of
a goddess of plenty. Later under Greek influence the concept of luck,
especially good-luck, slowly displaced the older idea. The