e earlier--and later--authors would speak of the intervention of
the gods in the march of history, he operates as a rule with an idea which
he calls Tyche. The word is untranslatable when used in this way. It is
something between chance, fortune and fate. It is more comprehensive and
more personal than chance; it has not the immutable, the "lawbound"
character of fate; rather it denotes the incalculability, the
capriciousness associated, especially in earlier usage, with the word
fortune, but without the tendency of this word to be used in a good sense.

This Tyche-religion--if we may use this expression--was not new in Hellas.
Quite early we find Tyche worshipped as a goddess among the other deities,
and it is an old notion that the gods send good fortune, a notion which
set its mark on a series of established phrases in private and public
life. But what is of interest here is that shifting of religious ideas in
the course of which Tyche drives the gods into the background. We find
indications of it as early as Thucydides. In his view of history he lays
the main stress, certainly, on human initiative, and not least on rational
calculation, as the cause of events. But where he is obliged to reckon
with an element independent of human efforts, he calls it Tyche and not
"the immortal gods." A somewhat similar view we find in another great
political author of the stage of transition to our period, namely,
Demosthenes. Demosthenes of course employs the official apparatus of gods:
he invokes them on solemn occasions; he quotes their authority in support
of his assertions (once he even reported a revelation which he had in a
dream); he calls his opponents enemies of the gods, etc. But in his
political considerations the gods play a negligible part. The factors with
which he reckons as a rule are merely political forces. Where he is
compelled to bring forward elements which man cannot control, he shows a
preference for Tyche. He certainly occasionally identifies her with the
favour of the gods, but in such a way as to give the impression that it is
only a _facon de parler_. Direct pronouncements of a free-thinking kind
one would not expect from an orator and statesman, and yet Demosthenes was
once bold enough to say that Pythia, the mouthpiece of the Delphic Oracle,
was a partisan of Macedonia, an utterance which his opponent Aeschines,
who liked to parade his orthodoxy, did not omit to cast in his teeth. On
the whole, Aeschines