Fortune

Fortune is the personified force that governs chance, change, and the distribution of worldly goods. It can bring prosperity or adversity without regard to human merit.

Fortuna: The Roman goddess who personified luck, fate, and the shifting outcomes of human affairs. Her cult gave Fortune a divine form associated with both prosperity and reversals.
Tyche: The Greek goddess and personification of chance, prosperity, and the fortunes of cities and individuals. Tyche is the Greek counterpart whose imagery and functions fed Roman ideas of Fortune.
Fate: A predetermined course of events that cannot be altered by human choice. Fortune suggests contingency and reversal, while fate implies an outcome fixed in advance.
Fortune in literature: The use of Fortune as a theme or personified agent in literary works. Literary plots use Fortune’s reversals to expose the fragility of status and success.
Wheel of Fortune: A medieval symbol of worldly instability, showing Fortune raising some people and casting others down. The turning wheel makes Fortune’s changes of status and wealth visible.
Cicero: A Roman statesman and philosopher whose writings examined chance, providence, and human judgment. His arguments preserve Roman debates about whether Fortune governs events or merely appears to.
Divine providence: The belief that a deity guides events toward an intended order or purpose. Providence gives events an ordering purpose that Fortune’s apparent randomness lacks.
Fortune in Shakespeare: The treatment of luck, change, and worldly reversal in William Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Shakespeare repeatedly tests whether human action can withstand Fortune’s unpredictable turns.
Lady Luck: A personification of luck as a woman who grants or withholds favorable outcomes. This familiar figure preserves Fortune’s association with unpredictable good or bad outcomes.
Boethius: A late antique Roman philosopher whose Consolation of Philosophy examines Fortune and human happiness. His account of Fortune’s instability became a major source for medieval interpretations.

Linked from 4 pages