told us of Nemesis, if less allegorical, is still merely the result of chap.
moral reflexion. In the world good and evil seem to be capriciously
distributed, so that on the one side we have the squalid beggar, on
the other the man whose prosperity is so unvar)'ing that his friend,
foreseeing the issue, sends to renounce all further alliance with him.
This inequality it is the business of Nemesis to remedy; and thus she
becomes practically an embodiment of righteous indignation at suc-
cessful wrong, although she is also regarded as the minister of the
gods who are jealous when the well-being of man passes beyond a
certain limit. ^ In either aspect she is Adrasteia, the being from
whom there is no escape.
In the meaning commonly attached to the word, Tyche denoted Tycha the idea of mere bUnd chance, scattering her gifts without any regard " to the deserts of those on whom they might fall. But this was not the conception which led some to represent her with a rudder as guiding the affairs of the world, and not only to place her among the Moirai, but to endow her with a power beyond that of the others.^ In her more fickle aspect she carries the ball in her hand, while her wealth and the nature of her gifts are denoted by the horn of Amal- theia at her side, and the boy Eros who accompanies her, or the Good Demons who sometimes surround her. As Akraia, Tyche becomes simply a name of Athene, the wealth-bringer ; with the epithet Agathe, good, she becomes practically identical with the Agathos Daimon, the nameless benignant deity invoked by cities and individual men. The names Theos and Daimon are often given to those unnamed forces in nature which are more felt in their general influences than in particular acts.* Nor is the assertion without warrant that the genuine utterances of the heart were addressed to this incompre- hensible power, of whose goodness generally they felt assured, and not to any mythical deities on whose capricious feelings no trust could be placed. When the swineherd Eumaios talks with Odysseus, we hear nothing of Zeus or Phoibos, but we are told simply that the unnamed God gives and takes away as may seem to him best. Nor can we doubt that even the mass of the people were impressed with the belief in a deity or power different in kind from the mythical deities brought before them by their epic or tragic poets. 1 his deity was simply the good God, or the unknown Being, worshipped ignorantly, whom St. Paul said that he came only to declare to them.
' (peoyephf rh Satixduiov — the doctrine Rhamnusian egg of Nemesis belongs to which lies at the root of the philosophy the story of Leda and Helen, attributed by Herodotos to Solon, and * Paus. vii. 26, 3. of the policy of Amasis in his dealings ' Prcller, G>: JSIyth. i. 421. with Polykrates. The myth of the
