In a later author, Pliny the Elder, we again find a characteristic
utterance throwing light upon the significance of the Tyche-religion.
After a very free-thinking survey of the popular notions regarding the
gods, Pliny says: "As an intermediate position between these two views
(that there is a divine providence and that there is none) men have
themselves invented another divine power, in order that speculation about
the deity might become still more uncertain. Throughout the world, in
every place, at every hour of the day, Fortune alone is invoked and named
by every mouth; she alone is accused, she bears the guilt of everything;
of her only do we think, to her is all praise, to her all blame. And she
is worshipped with railing words--she is deemed inconstant, by many even
blind; she is fickle, unstable, uncertain, changeable; giving her favours
to the unworthy. To her is imputed every loss, every gain; in all the
accounts of life she alone fills up both the debit and the credit side,
and we are so subject to chance that Chance itself becomes our god, and
again proves the incertitude of the deity." Even if a great deal of this
may be put down to rhetoric, by which Pliny was easily carried away, the
solid fact itself remains that he felt justified in speaking as if Dame
Fortune had dethroned all the old gods.

That this view of life must have persisted very tenaciously even down to a
time when a strong reaction in the direction of positive religious feeling
had set in, is proved by the romances of the time. The novels of the
ancients were in general poor productions. Most of them are made after the
recipe of a little misfortune in each chapter and great happiness in the
last. The two lovers meet, fall in love, part, and suffer a series of
troubles individually until they are finally united. The power that
governs their fates and shapes everything according to this pattern is
regularly Tyche, never the gods. The testimony of the novels is of special
significance because they were read by the general mass of the educated
classes, not by the select who had philosophy to guide them.

Another testimony to the weakening of popular faith in the Hellenistic age
is the decay of the institution of the Oracle. This, also, is of early
date; as early as the fifth and fourth century we hear much less of the
interference of the oracles in political matters than in earlier times.
The most important of them all, the Delphic Oracle, was