Fortuna
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Fortuna. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
A powerful deity among the ancients, daughter of Oceanus, according to Homer, or one of the Parcae, according to Pindar. She was the goddess of Fortune, and bestowed riches or poverty on mankind. Fortunatae or -orum Insulae (The Islands of the Blessed). The early Greeks, as we learn from Homer, placed the Elysian Fields, into which favored heroes passed without dying, at the extremity of the earth, near the river Oceanus. In poems later than Homer an island is spoken of as their abode; and though its position was of course indefinite, the poets, and the geographers who followed them, placed it beyond the Pillars of Hercules . Hence, when certain islands were discovered in the ocean, off the west coast of Africa, the name of Fortunatae Insulae was applied to them. They are now called the Canary and Madeira islands. or
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in mythology, daughter of Oceanus according to Homer, or one of the Parcæ according to Pindar, was the goddess of fortune, and from her hand were derived riches and poverty, pleasures and pains, blessings and misfortunes. She was worshipped in different parts of Greece. Bupalus was the first who modeled a statue of Fortuna for the people of Smyrna, and he represented her with the polar star upon her head, and the horn of plenty in her hand. The Romans held her in high esteem, and had no less than eight different temples erected to her honor in their city. She is generally represented blindfolded, and holding a wheel in her hand, as an emblem of her inconstancy. Sometimes she appears with wings.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries describe Fortuna as the ancients did, and on the myth itself little has moved: the genealogies from Homer and Pindar still stand, and the rudder, wheel and horn of plenty remain her standard attributes. What has changed is emphasis. Modern scholarship keeps Roman Fortuna more carefully apart from the Greek Tyche whose traits the older accounts blend into her, and it treats her as a genuine state cult rather than a poetic abstraction: Allied bombing of Palestrina in 1944 stripped away the medieval town and revealed the vast terraced sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia beneath it, one of the largest religious complexes in Republican Italy. The round temple in Rome's Largo Argentina, excavated in the 1920s, is now generally identified as the temple of Fortuna Huiusce Diei, giving physical substance to Collier's claim of "eight different temples" in the city.
Written for this edition, 2026.