Trade and handicraft were thus added to the Roman world, of men on earth, and of the gods above the earth, and it remains for us to consider the awakening of the political spirit and its corresponding religious phenomenon; but before we do this, we must clear the way by casting aside one ancient hypothesis connected with Servius’s religious reforms, which is not correct, at least in the way in which the ancients meant it.

The writing of the earlier period of Rome’s history is sometimes complicated rather than helped by the statements of the generally well-meaning but often misguided historians of later times.  Their real knowledge of the facts was in many cases no greater than ours, while they lacked what modern historians possess:  a breadth of view and a knowledge of the phenomena of history in many periods and among many nations.  The study of the social and religious movements under Servius presents us with an interesting illustration of this.  It was customary namely to ascribe to Servius Tullius the introduction of the cult of Fortuna, and Plutarch takes occasion twice in his Moralia to describe the interest of Servius in this cult and to recount the extraordinary number of temples which he built to the great goddess of chance under her various attributes.  The Romans of Plutarch’s day thought of Fortuna in very much the way in which their poets, especially Horace, described her, as a great and powerful goddess of chance, the personification of the element of apparent caprice which seems to be present in the running of the universe.  It is very much our way of thinking of her, and of course both our own concept and the later Roman concept go back to Greece.  But Greece had not always had this idea of the goddess of luck.  The older purer age of Greek thought was permeated with the idea of the absolute immutable character of the divine will, a belief which precluded the possibility of chance or caprice.  The earliest Greek Tyche (Fortuna) was the daughter of Zeus who fulfilled his will; and that his will through her was often a beneficent will is shown in the tendency to think of her as a goddess of plenty.  It was only the growth of scepticism, the failure of faith to bear up under the apparently contradictory lessons of experience, which brought into being in the Alexandrian age Tyche, the goddess of chance, the winged capricious deity poised on the ball.  It was this habit of thought which eventually gave the Romans that idea of Fortuna which has became our idea because it is the prevalent one in Roman literature and life in the periods with which we are most familiar.  Now if Fortuna be thought of in this latter way, it is a very easy matter to connect her with Servius Tullius, for the legendary accounts of Servius’s career picture him as a very child of “fortune,” raised from the lowest estate to the highest power, the little slave boy who became king.  What goddess would he delight to honour, if not the goddess of the happy chance which had made him what he was?