Moerae

Somewhere apart from the bright councils of Olympus, three women work at wool. One draws the fibre from the distaff and twists it onto the spindle. One measures the length that comes off. One waits with the shears. The thread they handle is a human life, and when the third of them closes her blades the person that thread belonged to dies, wherever he happens to be standing, whatever he happens to be doing. The gods can watch. The gods mostly do not interfere.

The Greeks called them the Moirai, from a word that means a share or a portion, the piece of the whole that falls to you. The Romans called them the Parcae. In English they became the Fates. Hesiod named the three: Clotho, the Spinner, who begins the thread; Lachesis, the Apportioner, who measures how much there will be; and Atropos, whose name means the one who cannot be turned, who cuts. The division of labour is neat and terrible. Birth, span, death, handed between three pairs of hands like a task on an assembly line.

Their parentage is disputed, and the disagreement matters. In one passage of the Theogony they are the daughters of Nyx, Night, born without a father alongside her other grim children, Death and Doom and the black spirits of vengeance. In another passage, only a few hundred lines away, Hesiod makes them daughters of Zeus and Themis, the Titaness of divine law, sisters to the Seasons and to Order, Justice, and Peace. The two accounts describe two different universes. In the first, fate is older than the gods and answers to no one. In the second, fate is an instrument of Zeus, an expression of the cosmic law he upholds. The Greeks never chose between them, and their poets kept both, sometimes calling Zeus the leader of the Fates and sometimes admitting that not even he could unmake what the three had spun.

No single face was ever agreed on. On painted vases and carved relief they appear as women, sometimes young and grave, sometimes bent and old, dressed in white and crowned with wool. In Plato’s vision at the close of the Republic they sit on thrones around the great spindle of Necessity, robed in white with garlands on their heads, singing to the turning of the cosmos: Lachesis of what has been, Clotho of what is, Atropos of what will be, their hands resting on the whorls to keep them moving. The tools stay constant even when the bodies do not: the distaff, the spindle heavy with its accumulating thread, the measuring rod, the shears.

The Romans gave them one of literature’s great set pieces. At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, in Catullus’s long poem, the Parcae sit among the guests with their spinning, their white robes edged with purple, their old bodies trembling, and they sing the future of the child the marriage will produce. A refrain runs through the song like the whir of the wheel: run on, spindles, run on, drawing out the threads. What they sing is Achilles, his glory at Troy, the rivers there choked with the dead he will make, and his own early death folded into the same breath as his fame. The bride sits listening to the whole life of her unborn son, the triumph and the grave together, and there is nothing in the song she can change.

The clearest demonstration of their reach is a log. When Meleager was seven days old the Fates came to his mother Althaea in Calydon and told her that the child would live exactly as long as the brand then burning on her hearth. She snatched it from the fire, doused it, and locked it in a chest, and for years her son grew strong on borrowed time. Then Meleager, grown, killed her brothers in a quarrel over the hide of the Calydonian boar. Althaea took the log out of its chest and put it back in the flames, and as it charred her son felt himself burning from the inside in a place with no fire, and died. The Fates had not lifted a finger. They had simply named the condition aloud once, decades before, and it held.

That is the whole of what they are. They do not bargain.

Their power is the plainest and the largest in the Greek imagination: they decide the length and the shape of every life, and their decision binds mortals, heroes, and gods. Apollo once got them drunk to win a reprieve for his friend Admetus, and the concession they granted was not that Admetus be spared but that another could die in his place, the debt paid in full, only the name on it changed. Even Zeus weighs fate rather than overturns it. In the Iliad he lifts his golden scales, sets the death-lots of two heroes in the pans, and watches to see which one sinks. The Romans, whose Parcae had begun as homely goddesses of birth with names like Nona and Decima, the ninth month and the tenth, made them the same implacable trio, adding Morta, death, to close the set.

And yet the limit is built into the gift. The Fates hold no throne, command no armies, fight no monsters. Their authority is entirely bound up in the thread, and away from it they are nothing. They can be delayed, as Althaea delayed them, though never cheated of the final sum. They can be flattered and fed wine into granting a technicality. Above all they are not free themselves. They do not choose what to spin any more than the dying man chooses to die; they are the enforcement of a law none of them wrote, three workers on an eternal shift, turning out the one product no one, not even the buyer, is allowed to refuse.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Moerae in Greek mythology?

The Moerae, better known as the Moirai or the Fates, are the three Greek goddesses of destiny who control the lifespan of every mortal and god. They are named Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, and Hesiod calls them daughters either of Night or of Zeus and Themis. The Romans identified them with their own goddesses of fate, the Parcae.

What do Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos each do?

Each of the three Fates handles one stage of a life imagined as a thread of wool. Clotho, the Spinner, spins the thread at a person’s birth; Lachesis, the Apportioner, measures out its length to set the lifespan; and Atropos, the Inflexible, cuts it to bring death. The image of spinning, measuring, and cutting is the core of how the Greeks pictured fate.

Who are the Roman Parcae?

The Parcae are the Roman equivalents of the Greek Fates, named Nona, Decuma, and Morta. They began as goddesses associated with childbirth, their names referring to the ninth and tenth months of pregnancy, before being fully merged with the three Moirai. Roman poets such as Catullus, Ovid, and Horace depict them spinning the thread of destiny and binding even the gods.

Can the Fates’ decisions be changed?

The Fates’ decisions can be delayed but never truly undone. Meleager’s mother Althaea postponed his death for years by hiding the log his life depended on, and Apollo won his friend Admetus a reprieve, but only on the condition that someone else die in his place. Even Zeus is shown weighing fates on his scales rather than reversing them, and the final outcome the Fates set always holds.

How did the Fates cause Meleager’s death?

When the hero Meleager was seven days old, the Fates told his mother Althaea that he would live only as long as a log then burning in her hearth. She pulled the log from the fire and hid it, keeping him alive, but years later she threw it back into the flames after Meleager killed her brothers. As the log burned away, Meleager died, killed by the condition the Fates had set at his birth.

Related Entries

Ananke, Nyx, Themis, Zeus, Nemesis, Thanatos, Ker, Hecate, Cronus, Uranus, Gaia, Hades, Persephone, Norns, Erinyes (Furies)