Tyche
TOO-kay
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesFortune. Hesiod lists her among the daughters of Ocean without comment. Pindar makes her a saviour and a daughter of Zeus the Deliverer, and asks her to guard a city.
She is the one power in the Greek scheme who is not answerable to the others, and the one a soldier is most likely to name. What she gives can be neither earned nor kept.
Acenes' conclusion after the Sphinx, that no amount of preparation readies you for every possibility and that what can be governed is the response, is the Stoic position set down about a century before the Stoa existed to teach it. He arrives at it through Tyche rather than through doctrine.
Sources
- Hes. Theog. 360
- Pind. Ol. 12.1-2
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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