Abstract
The concept of Fortune (Tychē) had lain at the very center of traditional pagan thought about history. Herodotus thought that the gods intervened in history to control the course of men's fortunes. His successor Thucydides completely rejected any notion of divine intervention in history, but nevertheless used the word tychē twenty-eight times in his speeches, and eleven times in his narrative sections. He did not imply anything which we today would call supernatural by his use of the word, simply unforeseen chance occurrences which disrupted human plans. Polybius' use of the concept of Fortune was particularly notorious, and a vast literature exists on the question of what this historian in fact meant by the term, and whether he thought of Fortune in different ways at different stages in his own intellectual development.
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