Fate

Heimarmenē (εἱμαρμένη) is fate or destiny — literally 'that which is allotted', from meiromai, 'to receive as one's portion'. It names the fixed order of causes, the chain of necessity by which event is bound to follow upon event. The Greeks pictured it as the thread spun and cut by the three Fates, the Moirai.

Fate and the stars

In the Hellenistic age fate was bound up with the heavens: the wheeling stars and planets were thought to weave the destinies of all things below, and astrology made a science of reading them. For the Stoics, heimarmenē was simply the rational order of the whole, identical with providence and with God — an unbreakable web of causes that the wise accept with assent.

Saving freedom

The Platonists worked hard to set fate within limits. Proclus and others distinguished providence, which belongs to the gods and the realm of Intellect, from fate, which governs the bodily and natural order; the rational soul, because it can turn toward the intelligible, is not wholly subject to the chain of fate but keeps a power of free choice. The Myth of Er teaches the same lesson: the soul chooses its own lot, and 'the blame belongs to the chooser — god is blameless'.