page_title: Rota Fortunae
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Rota Fortunae / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration from John Lydgate's Siege of Troy, showing the Wheel of Fortune held/turned by the Quene of Fortune. On the left, Dame Doctryne is accompanyied by two male figures, Holy Texte and Scrypture, and two female figures, Glose and Moralyzacion. They are shown helping people rise on Fortune's Wheel because, Lydgate says, scripture is about that which shall fall.
context_page_description: In medieval and ancient philosophy the Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae, is a symbol of the capricious nature of Fate. The wheel belongs to the goddess Fortuna who spins it at random, changing the positions of those on the wheel: some suffer great misfortune, others gain windfalls. The metaphor was already a cliche in ancient times, complained about by Tacitus, but was greatly popularized for the Middle Ages by its extended treatment in the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius from around 520. It became a common image in manuscripts of the book, and then other media, where Fortuna, often blindfolded, turns a large wheel of the sort used in watermills, to which kings and other powerful figures are attached.
context_section_description: The origin of the word is from the "wheel of fortune"—the zodiac, referring to the Celestial spheres of which the 8th holds the stars, and the 9th is where the signs of the zodiac are placed. The concept was first invented in Babylon and later developed by the ancient Greeks.
  The concept somewhat resembles the Bhavacakra, or Wheel of Becoming, depicted throughout Ancient Indian art and literature, except that the earliest conceptions in the Roman and Greek world involve not a two-dimensional wheel but a three-dimensional sphere, a metaphor for the world.  It was widely used in the Ptolemaic perception of the universe as the zodiac being a wheel with its "signs" constantly turning throughout the year and having effect on the world's fate (or fortune).
  In the second century BC, the Roman tragedian Pacuvius wrote:
  Fortunam insanam esse et caecam et brutam perhibent philosophi,
  Saxoque instare in globoso praedicant volubili:
  
  Id quo saxum inpulerit fors, eo cadere Fortunam autumant.
  
  Caecam ob eam rem esse iterant, quia nihil cernat, quo sese adplicet; 
  
  Insanam autem esse aiunt, quia atrox, incerta instabilisque sit; 
  
  Brutam, quia dignum atque indignum nequeat internoscere.
  Philosophers say that Fortune is insane and blind and stupid,
  
  and they teach that she stands on a rolling, spherical rock:
  
  they affirm that, wherever chance pushes that rock, Fortuna falls in that direction.
  
  They repeat that she is blind for this reason: that she does not see where she's heading;
  
  they say she's insane, because she is cruel, flaky and unstable;
  
  stupid, because she can't distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.
  — Pacuvius, Scaenicae Romanorum Poesis Fragmenta. Vol. 
  1, ed. O. Ribbeck, 1897
  The idea of the rolling ball of fortune became a literary topos and was used frequently in declamation.  In fact, the Rota Fortunae became a prime example of a trite topos or meme for Tacitus, who mentions its rhetorical overuse in the Dialogus de oratoribus.
  In the second century AD, astronomer and astrologer Vettius Valens wrote:
  There are many wheels, most moving from west to east, but some move from east to west.
  Seven wheels, each hold one heavenly object, the first holds the moon...
  Then the eighth wheel holds all the stars that we see...
  And the ninth wheel, the wheel of fortunes, moves from east to west,
  and includes each of the twelve signs of fortune, the twelve signs of the zodiac.
  Each wheel is inside the other, like an onion's peel sits inside another peel, and there is no empty space between them.
caption: The "Queen of Fortune", helped by four other personifications, turns her wheel.
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