The Moirai

The balance above Hector

The hero Achilles chases Hector around the walls of Troy for the fourth time. The god Apollo has kept Hector running, but the time for a god’s protection is over. Zeus lifts a golden balance and puts a fate of death on each side, one for Achilles and one for Hector. Hector’s share sinks down towards Hades, the land of the dead. Apollo leaves him.

The scene comes from the Iliad, the epic poem of Homer. It shows fate at work without bringing the three Moirai onto the battlefield. Zeus holds the scales, but the shares already belong to the two men. The goddess Athena then tricks Hector into stopping, and Achilles kills him. Fate does not push the spear, and it is not a forecast that action can ignore. It sets the limit within which gods and mortals make their final choices.

That question follows the Moirai through Greek literature. They hand out what a life contains. But ancient writers do not agree whether their power comes from Night, Zeus, Themis or Necessity. Even their three familiar names do not give one fixed set of beliefs about them.

The two families in Hesiod

The early Greek poet Hesiod gives the Moirai two births in his poem the Theogony. Early in the poem, Night gives birth to them without a partner. They stand among Doom, Death, Sleep and Nemesis. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos give mortals good and evil at birth. They then chase wrongdoing among gods and people until it is punished.

Much later, the same poem makes them daughters of Zeus and the goddess Themis. There they come after the Horae, goddesses whose names mean Order, Justice and Peace. Zeus gives the Moirai the highest honour, and the poem again says they give mortals good and evil.

The two passages agree on the names and the work, but not on the parents. That changes where the Moirai stand. As daughters of Night, they belong to powers older than the rule of Zeus and the Olympian gods. As daughters of Zeus and Themis, they are part of the order Zeus set up. The poem keeps both and does not explain either away.

Their names divide the work. Clotho is linked with spinning, Lachesis with the lot each person is given, and Atropos with what cannot be turned aside. These meanings led to the later picture of a life as a thread. Hesiod’s main point is wider: the Moirai hand out the mixed share of good and evil that comes with birth.

What Plato makes them sing

The philosopher Plato tells a story in his Republic called the Myth of Er. In it, the three Moirai sit around the spindle of Necessity, a rod for spinning thread that turns the heavens. Each sits on a throne, dressed in white, with a band round her head. Their song divides time. Lachesis sings what has been, Clotho what is and Atropos what will be.

Their hands keep the movement of the heavens in order. Clotho touches the outer circle with her right hand. Atropos turns the inner circles with her left. Lachesis helps each in turn. Here the Moirai are daughters of Necessity, not of Night or Themis, and their spinning drives the turning of the whole universe.

Souls waiting to return to life draw lots and choose lives. Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos then confirm each choice. This holds choice and necessity together. A soul chooses, but once the choice has passed through the three sisters, it cannot be taken back.

Why Delphi showed only two

Delphi was the home of Apollo’s oracle, where the god answered questions. Inside his temple there, Pausanias, an ancient writer who described the places of Greece, saw a group that broke the expected number. There were statues of two Moirai. Beside them, in place of the third, stood Zeus Moiragetes and Apollo Moiragetes. Each title means guide of fate.

Pausanias does not say which of the three named sisters was missing. He also does not say whether Zeus and Apollo command the Moirai or share the work usually divided among them. Visitors met two Fates and two gods together, where three Fates might have stood.

Other objects nearby made the temple a place where past and present met. The porch carried the sayings “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess”. A hearth marked the place where Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, was killed. A stone said to be the one the god Cronus swallowed received oil each day and raw wool at festivals. Among these, the group of two Moirai did not reduce fate to one teaching. Delphi gave the Moirai two gods as guides and left one sister’s place empty.