Muses

The Muses are goddesses and teachers of divine wisdom evoked in dance, music, and poetry. Late sources suggest that they invented the alphabet (Diod. Sic. 7.74.1) and the arts and sciences (Anth. Lat. 1.1.88; 1.2.664).

Personifications

Artists as early as Homer created personifications – representations of nouns in human form – to explain aspects of the primary characters, particularly Olympian divinities: the Litai (Prayers) as daughters of Zeus, for example, express an aspect of Zeus' broad-ranging powers.

Tyche

The word tyche (plural tychai) denotes an ancient Greek concept encompassing many aspects of fortune – chance, fate, luck, occurrence, even achievement, success, and wealth – both good and bad. As a personification of that concept, the goddess Tyche came to symbolize the fate and fortune of rulers and through them their cities; she thus emerged as the preeminent city goddess throughout the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Her name is etymologically related to the verb tynchanein (“to hit, meet with, be favored with, happen accidentally”). The connection between the noun and verb is so close that it is difficult to distinguish in Greek literature between the deity and the abstraction.