Tykhê – (tee-hee), is the Greek goddess of fortune and chance. To the ancient Greeks, she explained the unpredictability of life. Whenever there was disaster, it was Tykhe. She was considered fickle, bestowing on one, great riches while for another, taking every thing. In Greek, the word, tykhe, means luck. It is said that the inventor, Palamedes dedicated the first set of dice to the goddess Tykhe at her temple in Argos, Greece. Interestingly, she rolled snake eyes for him; he was wrongly accused of being a traitor during the Trojan war and killed.
Recently, I read that Americans just can’t get that bad things happen to good people. The Greeks understood that it not only could, but that it did.
It’s actually a very liberating idea.
As the character of Marcus Cole said in the television series Babylon Five,
“I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?’ So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
It’s Greek to me. It’s just tykhe. I can live with that.
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