Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

Reading language

Book I Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Fortune beyond calculation

That the course of fortune cannot be calculated.²³⁶

1 Menander, The Lyre Player

What a shifting, wandering thing is fortune!

2 Menander, Progamōn

The business of fortune, you know, has many changes.²³⁷

3 ⟨Menander⟩

Fortune is indeed a blind and wretched thing.²³⁸

4 Sophocles, Oedipus (977-978)

Why should a person fear, when fortune’s dealings rule him, and there is certain foresight of nothing?²³⁹

5 Menander

Nothing that fortune does comes about by calculation.

6 Euripides, Helen (711-715)

Consider how changeful the god is, how hard to fathom: how deftly he turns things about, carrying them this way and that. One man toils; another, without having toiled, then perishes miserably, with nothing secure in his fortune from moment to moment.²⁴⁰

7a Menander, Xenologos

Fortune makes it so impossible to calculate what, after all, is beneficial in a human life. She uses no laws by which to judge affairs, and no one living can say, “This will not happen to me.”²⁴¹

7b ⟨Euripides, Hippolytus (701)⟩

For the minds we have accord with our fortunes.²⁴²

8 Euripides, Danaë

I say that mortals’ fortunes come to the same thing as the one they call Aether, whoever he may be. He shines with the bright radiance of summer and raises winter storms, gathering thick cloud; he makes things flourish or not, live or die away. So the stock of some mortals prospers in bright calm, while for others it clouds over again. Some live amid troubles, while others with wealth fade away, much like the changes of the year.²⁴³

9a ⟨Aëtius, Opinions⟩

Epicurus calls chance a cause that varies with persons, times, and places. Anaxagoras and the Stoics call it a cause obscure to human calculation. For some things occur according to necessity, others according to fate, others according to choice, others according to chance, and others according to spontaneous occurrence.²⁴⁴

9b ⟨Anonymous⟩

Chance is a name for disorderly activity.²⁴⁵

10 Diotogenes the Pythagorean, On Piety

For four causes bring everything to completion and carry it to its end: nature, law, skill, and fortune. And of those things … law is the overseer and maker of what, through habit, conduces to civic harmony.²⁴⁶ Skill ⟨might⟩ be called the mother and guide of things accomplished through human intelligence. As for events that fall at random and by happenstance, of themselves, alike upon good and bad people, we shall call fortune their cause. It is fixed within neither measure nor limit and does everything in a confused fashion. Though born from one and the same stock, it moves in both directions.²⁴⁷

236.The heading concerns the inability to calculate fortune’s course. The excerpts variously describe changeability, lack of rational order, and causes hidden from human calculation; these are related but distinct explanations.

237.The heading is reproduced as printed. Wachsmuth also refers this line to a fragment of Chaeremon, and his apparatus records competing forms of the play-title. The uncertain Greek title is left untranslated.

238.The attribution is supplied in the base edition. “Wretched” follows the printed dystēnon; the apparatus records conjectures that would instead describe fortune as difficult to rein in.

239.The reference is to Oedipus the King. The question turns the lack of reliable foreknowledge into an argument against fear; it does not say that the future contains no danger.

240.The transmitted lines contrast toil with sudden ruin, without promising a proportionate relation between effort and outcome. “Deftly” renders eu in the description of reversal; it does not make the result morally good.

241.The third line has textual and metrical difficulties; the apparatus offers several repairs. The translation follows the printed text. The title Xenologos is retained in Greek transliteration.

242.The supplied heading separates this tragic verse from the preceding Menander excerpt. It connects a person’s state of mind with the circumstances that person experiences.

243.Aether, the upper air or sky, is personified through the changing weather. The comparison concerns alternating conditions, not a stable correspondence between prosperity and survival. Eteiois in the last line means yearly or annual.

244.The report contrasts a cause’s variability with its obscurity to human reasoning. The following list is retained as the compiler transmits it, without assuming that every distinction was used identically by all the named thinkers.

245.This short definition has no surviving author-heading. Wachsmuth separates it from the preceding report and does not accept the proposed attribution to Democritus recorded in his apparatus.

246.The ellipsis marks a gap in the source. The opening list includes nature, but its corresponding explanation is missing; the translation does not fill the gap. The preserved Doric phrase ex atheos means “from habit.”

247.“In a confused fashion” follows Wachsmuth’s correction pephyrmenōs. The final sentence is compressed: “both directions” appears to refer to favorable and unfavorable results. Its wording is retained without turning the passage into a more systematic theory than the surviving text provides.