fate
Fate, according to modern usage, is an agency
or power that orders and predetermines a future
course of events. In the ancient world, the often
inexplicable and unavoidable in the affairs of human
beings were attributed to fate. In Greek mythol-
ogy, the goddesses known as the Fates, or Moirae,
spun out the destinies of men and women. With
the resurgence of confidence in human agency in
fifth-century Athens, the Greeks began to develop
more subtle conceptions of the relationship between
fate and free will, especially through the tragedies
of their theater, which were grounded in religious
ritual.
Sophocles’s oedipus the kinG presents the clas-
sical treatment of human action as determined by
fate or free will, or a convergence of the two. Such
a convergence is understandable through a thought
of the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “Man’s
character is his fate [daimōn]” (Fragment 119), or
the more familiar “Character is destiny.” Since demon
(Gr. daimōn) means both “supernatural being” and
“ministering, or indwelling spirit” (Oxford English
Dictionary), the statement allows a convergence of
superhuman and human agency, fate and free will.
In other words, the guidance of our actions derives
from ourselves, our own character. Sophocles’ trag-
edy supremely illustrates this idea. Oedipus, a prince
of Corinth who is led to doubts about his parentage
by a stray comment from a drunken man, goes to
Delphi, where he consults the oracle, which tells
him that he will kill his father and marry his mother.
Shocked by this prophecy, Oedipus immediately
flees Corinth to evade the oracle, the illogic and
inconsistency of his actions never occurring to him.
Regarding the unresolved question of parentage, he
is fleeing the king and queen of Corinth, who might
not be his parents. Regarding his contradictory
attitude toward the oracle, he believes in the oracle
enough to react to its admonition but not enough to
realize that he cannot evade his foreknown destiny.
His destiny, however, is not necessarily predeter-
mined by the powers above. Rather, his foreknowl-
edge makes him act irrationally to fulfill his destiny.
This irrational conduct is part and parcel of his
hubris (the overstepping of the bounds of human
conduct), as exhibited often in his killing of an older
man (his real father) in a fit of alpha male rage and
his angry browbeating of both Creon, his trustwor-
thy brother-in-law, and Teiresias, the revered seer,
when they tell him that he himself is the murderer
of the former king of Thebes—to him preposterous
but, nonetheless, the truth.
Ironically, Oedipus’s foreknowledge drove him to
fulfill the very prophecy that he was trying so hard
to evade. He broke the two cardinal rules of Greek
ethics that would guide one toward good destiny:
“Know thyself ” and “Nothing in excess.” In his ver-
sion of Oedipus, Sophocles turns the standard story
of the futility of trying to evade an inevitable
fate dictated by the gods and transforms it into a
veritable tragedy of a human agent through his own
character flaws and actions.
In a further exploration of fate and autonomy,
human action, expanded to a wide sphere of civic
enterprise in Virgil’s The aeneid, translates itself
into a founding myth, whereby personal good
yields to the greater good of nation formation. It is
Aeneas, fleeing to Italy after the fall of Troy, who,
according to prophecy, will there found a noble and
courageous race, which in time will surpass all other
nations. At the same time, the fate of Aeneas and his
descendants, the Romans, is influenced by the gods’
actions, particularly in the conflict between Venus
and Juno, who respectively support and hinder the
Roman enterprise for reasons that go back to Priam’s
son Paris choosing Venus, goddess of love, as the
most beautiful over Hera, goddess of marriage, and
Athena, goddess of wisdom. Thus, in this nationalis-
tic epic, divine agency and human aspiration—both
personal and civic—constitute fate. Aeneas is the
epitome of Roman piety—loyalty and devotion
toward one’s homeland, family, and father—and his
fate is synonymous with the future of Rome. In his
wanderings, Aeneas finds shelter in Africa with the
sympathetic Dido, the queen of Carthage. Later, the
two fall in love and consummate their union. Aeneas
is torn between his desire for a woman and his patri-
otic love: “hic amor, haec patria est” (“There is my
love, there my country” [4.537]). Ultimately, both
divine pressure and a sense of duty, as solemnized
by prophecy, compel Aeneas to leave Dido, choosing
Roma and its implicit amor (Roma spelled back-
wards) of patria—love of country—as his destiny.fate 33