The headless statuette of goddess Tyche (MTh 9192) was found in 1983 in a rubble pile next to the Military Camp of Chortiatis, near Thessaloniki, and was handed over to the Archaeological Service by Mr. Christoforos Karavaris.

The statuette is made of almost white marble and was preserved incomplete, as parts of the hands, the head and the end of the left leg are missing, while there are several damages on its surface as well. It is smaller than the natural height and stands on a low oval base. The goddess wears a tunic, which is held with a belt under the chest, over which a himation is wrapped around her torso. In her left hand she holds the horn of Amalthea, which overflows with fruits and cereals, and symbolizes the abundance that good fortune bestows upon people. In her right hand she must have held a ship's rudder, judging by better preserved copies of the same statuary type. With this rudder, the goddess determines the course of human life, sometimes towards good luck and sometimes towards its opposite.

The concept of Tyche acquired a divine status quite early in the ancient Greek world, as the goddess is mentioned in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, Hesiod's Theogony, Orphic Hymns, by Alcman, Pindar, etc. According to Pausanias, Bupalos was the first to produce a statue of Tyche holding the horn of Amalthea in one hand, during the sixth century BC.

 The Chortiatis statuette dates back to the 2nd century AD, but it is one of the many copies of a statue of Fortune, which must have been created in the Hellenistic era. The great spread of the cult of Tyche after the campaign of Alexander the Great is due to the frequent reversals of individual and collective fortunes, which were caused by the constant wars between the kingdoms of the Successors. Similar events made the goddess particularly popular with the Romans (who called her Fortuna), so that every city had statues of the goddess placed at the center of its political and commercial life. Her depictions served as a reminder (or warning) for the citizens - but also to the leaders - of the fleeting nature of human good fortune and of the paramount importance of collective -over individual- good fortune, in the vastness of the Roman Empire.

In today's turbulent world scene, the great value of good fortune emerges again from the depths of History, to remind us of the tragic limitations of our human nature...    

You can see the statuette of goddess Tyche in the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, “In Macedonia from the 7th century B.C. to Late Antiquity”.