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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

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Book I Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Fate and the order of events

On fate and the orderly arrangement of what comes to pass.¹⁸⁰

1 Homer, Iliad

No man, I say, has ever escaped his fate, neither coward nor brave, once he has been born.¹⁸¹

2 Euripides, Andromeda

… Do you not see the divine power, how it passes through the allotments of fate? It turns now this way, now that, from day to day.¹⁸²

3 Bacchylides

Mortals cannot choose for themselves prosperity, unyielding war, or all-destroying civil strife; all-giving Fate brings a cloud close now over one land, now another.¹⁸³

4 Menander

A divine spirit stands beside every man from birth, his guide through the mysteries of life.¹⁸⁴

5 Hesiod, Theogony

And she bore the Fates and the ruthlessly avenging Keres, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, who give to mortals at their birth both good and evil as their portion.¹⁸⁵

6 Euripides, Children of Heracles

No man, I say, becomes prosperous or grievously fated apart from the gods. … What is allotted may not be escaped; no one will thrust it away by wisdom; the eager man will always labor in vain.¹⁸⁶

7 From Bion’s Bucolic Poems: On Hyacinthus

Speechlessness seized Phoebus then, as he saw your suffering. He sought every remedy and called upon his skilled art; he anointed you with ambrosia and nectar, anointed the wound after chanting spells. But all wounds dealt by fate are incurable.¹⁸⁷

8 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Fate alone is ruled by none among the gods or among human beings; she herself holds sway.

9 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

O Fate, huntress of the worthy and the wicked.

10 Euripides, Peleus

Hear me, O Fates, who sit beside Zeus’s throne, nearest to him of all the gods.

11 Sophocles, from Phaedra

Fate weaves with adamantine shuttles inescapable designs that surpass counsels of every kind.¹⁸⁸

12 ⟨An unidentified lyric poet⟩

Clotho and Lachesis, fair-armed daughters of Night, hear those who pray, divine powers of heaven and earth. O all-dreaded ones, send us rose-bosomed Good Order and her sisters on shining thrones, Justice and garland-bearing Peace; and make this city forget its grievous encounters with misfortune.¹⁸⁹

13 Sophocles, Phaedra

So you were alive, and had not gone dead beneath the earth? For fortune cannot force its way ahead of fate.¹⁹⁰

14 Hermes (1)

Seven far-wandering stars revolve across Olympus’s threshold, and with them eternity forever circles: night-shining Moon, gloomy Cronus, sweet Sun, bridal-chamber-bearing Paphian, bold Ares, well-winged Hermes, and Zeus, first begetter, from whom nature sprang. These same powers received the human race as their lot; in us are Moon, Zeus, Ares, Paphian, Cronus, Sun, and Hermes.¹⁹¹

14 Hermes (2)

Hence it is allotted to us to draw from the ethereal spirit tears, laughter, anger, generation, speech, sleep, and desire. Tears are Cronus; ⟨and⟩ Zeus is generation; speech is Hermes; anger is Ares; Moon is sleep; Cytherea is desire; and Sun is laughter: through him, fittingly, every mortal mind laughs, and the boundless cosmos too.¹⁹²

15 ⟨Aëtius, Opinions⟩ (1)

⟨Chrysippus⟩ holds that what is compelled does not differ from what is fated, ⟨and that fate is an everlasting movement of the whole⟩, connected through the interweaving of its parts.¹⁹³

Heraclitus declared that the substance of fate is the rational principle that pervades the substance of the universe. This substance is the ethereal body, the seed of the universe’s coming-to-be and the measure of its ordered cycle. Everything happens according to fate, and fate is also necessity. Thus he writes: “For things are altogether fated …”¹⁹⁴

15 ⟨Aëtius, Opinions⟩ (2)

Plato holds that the substance of fate is an everlasting rational principle and an everlasting law of the nature of the universe.

Posidonius places fate third, counting from Zeus: Zeus is first, nature second, and fate third.

Zeno the Stoic, in On Nature, calls it a power that moves matter in the same way and manner; it makes no difference to call this power providence or nature.

Antipater the Stoic declared that fate is God.¹⁹⁵

15 ⟨Aëtius, Opinions⟩ (3)

Chrysippus holds that the substance of fate is a power of pneuma that governs the universe in order. He says this in the second book of On the Cosmos. In the second book of On Definitions, in his writings On Fate, and here and there in other works, he states it in various ways: fate is the rational principle of the cosmos, or the rational principle of what is governed by providence within the cosmos, or the rational principle according to which past events have happened, present events happen, and future events will happen.¹⁹⁶

In place of “rational principle” he uses “truth,” “cause,” “nature,” and “necessity,” adding other names too, as terms applied to the same substance under different aspects.

15 ⟨Aëtius, Opinions⟩ (4)

Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are called Moirai, “Fates,” from the apportionment made in accordance with them. Lachesis is so named because the lot allotted to each is assigned according to justice. Atropos is so named because the determination of each particular thing, established from everlasting ages, is unalterable and unchangeable. Clotho is so named because distribution according to fate, and the things that come to be, proceed in a manner like things being spun. Through this etymological explanation, the names and the realities are helpfully presented together.¹⁹⁷

16 On the governance of the whole: Hermes, from the writings to Amoun

The power that sustains the whole cosmos is providence; the power that holds it together and encompasses it is necessity. Fate leads and carries everything around by compulsion (for its nature is to compel) and is the cause of life’s coming-to-be and passing away. The cosmos, then, has providence first, for it is the first to receive it …¹⁹⁸

Providence extends throughout heaven, because gods too revolve and move about it, their movement tireless and unceasing; and fate, because necessity too. Providence exercises foresight, while fate is the cause of the arrangement of the stars. This is an inescapable law according to which everything is ordered.¹⁹⁹

180.The chapter’s chief term, heimarmenē, is usually translated “fate.” The poems also use Moira and Aisa, words associated with an allotted portion or lot. Personified Fate, the three Fates, and philosophical accounts of causal order remain distinguishable in the translation.

181.Iliad 6.488-489. Kakos and esthlos are rendered here as cowardly and brave, preserving the contrast in the warrior’s speech rather than imposing an exclusively moral opposition between wicked and good.

182.The source begins the excerpt with dots. “Allotments of fate” renders the plural moiras; the apparatus records uncertainty over that form and over the wording of the final line. The English follows the printed text.

183.“All-giving” translates pandōros: Fate dispenses painful as well as welcome conditions. Arēs, the war-god’s name, is used here for war; stasis is internal conflict or civil strife.

184.Mystagōgos is a guide who introduces someone to sacred mysteries. The metaphor presents the daimōn as an accompanying guide to life; it does not specify a complete theory of fate.

185.Theogony 217-219. The mother is Night in the surrounding Hesiodic passage. The Keres are powers associated with death and destructive fate. The quotation’s grouping is retained without harmonizing it with other genealogies.

186.Children of Heracles 608-609 and 615-617. The separation between the two selections is already marked in Wachsmuth’s text; the dots are not a new omission made by this translation.

187.Phoebus is Apollo; the poem addresses the wounded Hyacinthus. Its contrast is between a healing god’s art and a wound assigned by fate. The last line depends on several corrections recorded in the base edition; these are followed here.

188.The weaving image gives fate a fabric that cannot be undone. The compact construction is taken to mean that Fate’s designs exceed every kind of counsel; “adamantine” describes the unyielding shuttles.

189.The author is left unidentified in the source. Eunomia, Dikē, and Eirēnē are translated as the personified Good Order, Justice, and Peace. The request is to relieve the city of the burden of affliction; it does not define how that relief is to occur.

190.Wachsmuth retains the Sophoclean heading and interprets the exchange as concerning Theseus’s descent to the underworld. The two lines can be read as a question and an answer; the second distinguishes fortune (tychē) from the prior limit set by fate (moira).

191.The seven are the Moon, Saturn, Sun, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter, named as divine powers. Paphian and, below, Cytherea are names of Aphrodite. Pastophoros literally suggests bearing a bridal chamber or shrine; the English retains the bridal image without silently replacing the printed word with a conjecture.

192.The poem itself pairs the seven powers with human experiences; their order changes between its lists. Logos is “speech” in this poetic correspondence with Hermes. The angle brackets retain the supplied conjunction in the base edition.

193.The author-name and the longer clause are supplied in the base edition. Wachsmuth’s apparatus explains that Diels restored them using parallel testimony. The brackets keep their reconstructed status visible.

194.This is a report about Heraclitus within the collection of opinions identified as Aëtius I.27-28. The quoted words are incomplete in the printed source. “Rational principle” renders logos without assuming that every doctrine in the report is a direct quotation from Heraclitus.

195.The repeated subject, fate, is often left implicit in the Greek. These brief reports distinguish a ranked sequence (Posidonius), interchangeable names (Zeno), and identification with God (Antipater); the English does not turn them into one statement.

196.Pneuma literally means breath or a breath-like medium. The Greek describes fate as a dynamis pneumatikē, a power of pneuma; translating it simply as a “spiritual power” could wrongly suggest something expressly incorporeal. Logos is consistently “rational principle” within this report.

197.The explanations connect Moirai with apportioning, Lachesis with receiving a lot, Atropos with what cannot be turned, and Clotho with spinning. They are part of the ancient argument about fate, not independent demonstrations that these names prove the doctrine.

198.The heading calls the addressee Amoun; Wachsmuth connects this name with Ammon elsewhere. The dots represent the gap marked by asterisks in the base edition. Its apparatus treats the following paragraph as the beginning of a new excerpt, although it remains under number 16.

199.“And fate, because necessity too” preserves an incomplete clause in the printed Greek. The apparatus proposes repairs and further gaps; none is silently substituted here. The relationships among the three powers are therefore less fully stated than the preceding paragraph’s clear definitions.