Fortuna

Fortuna (Latin: Fortūna), sometimes anglicized as Fortune, is the goddess of luck or fortune in Roman religion. She came to represent life's capriciousness, and was a goddess of fate. In antiquity she was also known by the epithet Automatia (Latin: Automatia; Greek: Αὐτοματία, "she who does what she will"). Her Greek equivalent is Tyche. Fortuna was often depicted with a gubernaculum (ship's rudder), a ball or wheel of fortune (first mentioned by Cicero) and a horn of plenty. She could be represented as veiled and blind, as in modern depictions of Lady Justice, except that Fortuna does not hold a balance. She was believed to bring either fortune or misfortune: As Atrox Fortuna ("Cruel Fortune"), she was said to have claimed the young lives of the princeps Augustus' grandsons Gaius and Lucius, prospective heirs to the Empire. Fortuna remained popular through the Middle Ages until at least the Renaissance, largely thanks to the late antique author Boethius, in whose work she appears as a personification of the hidden will of God. The blindfolded depiction of her is still an important figure in many aspects of modern Italian culture, where the dichotomy of fortuna (good luck, fortune) and sfortuna (bad luck, misfortune) plays a prominent role in everyday social life, as represented in the common maxim La (dea) fortuna è cieca, "(The goddess) Luck is blind" (Latin Fortuna caeca est).