Abstract

Palladas can hardly be credited with either a religious creed or a philosophical system, but he held some powerful convictions which were not necessarily consistent but certainly reflected his emotional responses to a life embittered by poverty, a nagging wife, and a profession which he detested. In so far as he believed that a single power controls circumstances, it was Tyche, to whom he refers with frequent comments, usually hostile. By the latter part of the fourth century A.D. the ancient belief in Tyche had become intellectually respectable in certain Pagan circles. There were of course those who followed the Cynics in denying any importance to her, and their rejection of her can be seen, in different forms and at different levels, in a Hermetic text which regards her as, in an anonymous couplet,1 which looks as if it came from the last years of Paganism