Wheel of Fortune (medieval)

The Wheel of Fortune, also called the Rota Fortunae, is an ancient and medieval symbol for how randomly Fate behaves. The goddess Fortuna (known to the Greeks as Tyche) owns this wheel and spins it without any plan, lifting some people up to sudden good luck and dropping others into disaster. Even in Roman times, the idea was already worn out as a cliché—the historian Tacitus complained about its overuse in speeches. But it got a major boost for the Middle Ages when Boethius gave it a long treatment in his *Consolation of Philosophy*, written around 520. After that, the image spread widely: first in manuscripts of Boethius’s book, then into other art forms. In these pictures, Fortuna—often shown blindfolded—cranks a big wheel like the kind used in watermills, with kings and other powerful people strapped onto it.

The word itself comes from the “wheel of fortune” referring to the zodiac, which was part of the celestial spheres: the eighth sphere holds the fixed stars, and the ninth carries the zodiac signs. The concept first appeared among the ancient Greeks, who developed it further. An early mention comes from Cicero’s *In Pisonem*, though the text does not actually reference the Wheel of Fortune. The idea is somewhat like the bhavachakra, or Wheel of Becoming, seen in ancient Indian art and literature, but the Greek and Roman version was not a flat wheel—it was a three-dimensional sphere, a metaphor for the whole world. This fit with the Ptolemaic view of the universe, where the zodiac acts like a wheel whose signs turn through the year, influencing fate.

In the second century BC, the Roman playwright Pacuvius wrote that philosophers say Fortune is insane, blind, and stupid. They picture her standing on a rolling, spherical rock: wherever chance shoves that rock, Fortune tumbles that way. She is blind because she cannot see where she is going, insane because she is cruel and unstable, and stupid because she cannot tell the worthy from the unworthy. This rolling-ball image became a common literary theme, used often in rhetorical exercises. Tacitus, in his *Dialogus de oratoribus*, pointed to the Wheel of Fortune as a prime example of a trite, overused topic.

In the second century AD, the astronomer and astrologer Vettius Valens described many wheels. Most move from west to east, but some go the opposite way.