Chance, Time and Virtue

Abstract

For the Greeks of the Golden Age, Time was a series of propitious moments -and as such could be represented in the figure of the god Kairos. People who thought less metaphorically than the Greeks of the classical age conceived Time as an abstract sequence: in the late Hellenistic period Kairos assumes the sense of xp6voC.1 The original god Kairos lives on as e6xaXplPxE, a notion which signifies one propitious moment in a lapse of time. The Byzantine sources of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Tzetzes, Nikephoros and others,2 therefore describe Lysippos' lost statue of 'Kairos' as 'Chronos.' Even Erasmus still translates Kairos as 'Tempus.' 3 It appears that Cicero was the first to define clearly the relation between xaxp6c-tempus and eboxaplE-occasio. He says: "Occasio est pars temporis, habens in se alicuius rei idoneam faciendi aut non faciendi opportunitatem .. ." 4 Thus, a differentiation between the two notions of time is introduced, which stresses the inter-relation of both in its positive as well as in its negative sense. A pictorial formula for this distinction hardly appears before the sixteenth century 5 and was never more drastically applied than in the engravings which accompany the work of the Jesuit Joannes David, published as late as I605.6 As in many Jesuit tracts the pictures are literal illustrations of the text. Each of the twelve chapters is accompanied by an engraving of Theodor Galle, which supplies a visual demonstration