Political historians will have to decide whether in all of this Demetrios’ prime motivation was to harm the wealthy or benefit the middle and lower classes.^[48] But Demetrios was also a philosopher, a philosopher who in his lifetime produced a corpus of Peripatetic writings second only to that of the prodigious Theophrastos.^[49] Theophrastos had been his teacher,^[50] and during his reign Demetrios helped the Eresian acquire a private garden (D.L. 5.39). Also during his reign he rescued the atheist Theodoros of Cyrene from charges of impiety (D.L. 2.101). In earlier years, in 322, he had served on an embassy with Xenocrates of Chalcedon, who headed the Academy from 339 to 314 B.C.^[51] He was, of all previous and later men in authority in Athens, the most philosophical (cf. Cic. Leg. 3.14), and it is during his ten-year reign that we can expect to have the best chance to see the influence of philosophy on contemporary religion. We pause here, therefore, to introduce a topic fundamental to understanding Hellenistic practiced religion: the influence of philosophy, philosophers, and philosophical statesmen on state and private religion.

Aristotle, as we have noted, had written in the Politics (1309a16–20) that democracies, for the sake of their own stability, should spare the rich costly and useless chorēgiai. And under Demetrios these were eliminated. Plato in the Laws had recommended various limitations on expenses for funerals and funerary monuments (Leg. 12.958D–960B), and Demetrios had some such enacted. Aristotle speaks of the institution of gynaikonomoi, and Plato and Theophrastos both urge restrictions on the activities of women and the extravagance of the citizens.^[52] H.-J. Gehrke, by a careful comparison of the philosophers’ statements on these subjects and Demetrios’ innovations (1978), has shown that there are significant and decisive differences. Sometimes officials with the same names have very different functions; sometimes the purposes seem quite different. To this extent Gehrke’s work is very valuable. But he goes too far, I suspect, in then rejecting all philosophical influence on Demetrios’ lawgiving and in accepting only political purposes, arising from current circumstances, for the innovations.^[53] The need and means of such reforms were obviously a common topic of discussion in the philosophical schools, and it is inconceivable that the statesman/philosopher Demetrios would have been unaffected by them. From them he may well, as a philosopher, have recognized the need and some of the means for reform without, as a statesman, having accepted the often utopian purposes and systems of the philosophical models. Demetrios was quite obviously not attempting a wholesale transformation of Athenian religion or society on Platonic or Aristotelian principles. He did not, for example, as Plato would have him do, eliminate dramatic festivals.^[54] On the contrary, as archon in 309/8 he staged the procession of the City Dionysia. But some of the needs and problems that affected contemporary religion were clearly among current philosophical topics, and Demetrios may well have selected and remodeled certain elements of those discussions to suit the circumstances of his time and people. The results on practiced religion are not to be denied, but they are certainly limited and, in the total scheme of things, concern primarily administrative details.

In one regard we find the philosopher Demetrios articulating some religious concerns of his time. A fragment of his essay (FGrHist 228 F 39) on the power and nature of tychē (“fortune”) seems to capture his generation’s feelings about her. Tychē is “unintelligible” (ἀσύνετος) to us and accomplishes her work “contrary to our calculations” (παρὰ λογισμὸν τὸν ἡμέτερον). She “demonstrates her power in what is contrary to our expectations” (ἐν τοῖς παραδόξοις). For Demetrios the events of the past fifty years—the virtual disappearance of the once powerful Persian empire and the rise and prosperity of the once humble Macedonians—reveal her power. Tychē has now given the “good things” to the Macedonians, “until she plans something else for them.”

There are various sides to tychē—the good and the bad, the divine and the profane.^[55] In both literature and life throughout the fifth and fourth centuries, tychē had often been given responsibility, as an impersonal, profane force, for the evils of life, especially for death.^[56] This continues in the late fourth century: in New Comedy characters, especially slaves, fault her for a host of misfortunes.^[57] But throughout the fourth century there is in the orators an increasing tendency to attribute to tychē responsibility for some beneficial activities once more commonly assigned to the gods.^[58] We may see the culmination of this trend in the establishment, by 335/4, of the state cult of Agathe Tyche (“Good Fortune”). In New Comedy too, characters, again usually slaves, regularly invoke tychē as a cause of the often welcome turns of events that characterize this genre, but usually with a caveat about the fickleness of fortune.^[59] In Menander’s Aspis (97–148) tychē even appears on stage as a goddess directing affairs, and there she claims that “if something unpleasant were happening to these characters, it would not be fitting for me, a goddess, to be attending them” (97–98). She is here, unmistakably, Agathe Tyche. In popular religion the Olympian gods were generally given responsibility for what was good in life, and when tychē is conceived of as beneficial Agathe Tyche, she too can become a deity.

The fragments of the New Comedy poet Philemon suggest that he, no less than Menander, had characters muse on the nature of tychē. A man’s tychē is “born with him” (9 KA); “One must work to assist tychē ” (56); “ Tychē is not a god. What happens to each man is called tychē ” (125); “What people themselves do for themselves does not involve tychē ” (137). In these and similar comments (116, 161, 166, 178) Philemon’s characters, like Demetrios, treat tychē as an impersonal, ineluctable force that must be recognized and accommodated in human life. In the last third of the fourth century the Athenians, through their cult of Agathe Tyche, must have thought it possible to influence her, but it is possible that this effort was short-lived. There is no evidence for her cult in the third century, and we do not hear of her again until the last quarter of the first centuryB.C. when her sanctuary in Piraeus, along with many others, was to be repaired (SEG 26.121). After the fourth century the Athenians may have, in general, reverted to the fifth-century view of tychē as essentially a negative, profane, unapproachable force, more like Philemon’s or Demetrios’ tychē than the tychē of the state cult or of Menander’s Aspis. Hence Demetrios’ essay on tychē may be, if not influential on, at least reflective of late-fourth-century views of tychē.^[60]