The Emperor’s Fortune Prevails: An Aspect of Charismatic Sovereignty between Paganism and Christianity

Tyche (‘Fortune’), conceived as an inscrutable force shaping human life beyond the reach of human agency, acquired in the Greek world the personified form of a divinity around the fourth century BCE. From this period onward, her cult was associated with those of other deities and she, as a pantheistic and cosmological goddess, became the protectress of many cities that erected monuments in her honour (tychaia). Fortuna, the Roman counterpart of Tyche, became from the age of Caesar onward a fundamental component of the imperial cult, actively promoted by Augustus and his successors. The Antonine and Severan emperors regularly described themselves as eutycheis in their titulature in the Greek East. From the late third century, however, the notion of eutychia underwent a transformation: it became less associated with the personal qualities of an individual emperor and increasingly referred to the imperial institution itself. That emperors should have adopted Fortune among their virtues is hardly surprising, insofar as their superhuman nature was believed to endow them with a quasi-magical capacity to discipline tyche. The superstitious dimension of Roman religiosity ensured that, even after Constantine, Christian emperors did not abandon the epithet “fortunate” (felices), which continued to be employed until the seventh century (although certain rulers of the first half of the fifth century, such as Theodosius II, Valentinian III, and Marcian, appear not to have used it). Attempts to resemanticize the pagan concept of Fortune within the framework of the new religion were perhaps only partially successful. In seventh-century testimonies, she appears as a cosmic force whose favour was magically inherent in the imperial institution and in the Roman empire. Even at the beginning of the tenth century, the ceremonial treatise of the atriklines Philotheos mentions minor dignitaries who bore the title eutychophoroi, “bearers of Fortune.”