at the same time the personification of what is allotted to one in life and the
agent that allots it. Hesiod (Th. 904–6) registers a trio of Moirai, ‘who give
mortal men both good and ill’. Their names express their different aspects:
Klotho ‘Spinner’, Lachesis ‘Apportioner’, and Atropos ‘Inflexible’.^16 The
three Moirai play a prominent role in modern Greek folk-tales, or did in the
nineteenth century. They come on the third night after a child’s birth and
pronounce its destiny.^17
At Rome the corresponding divinities are called the Parcae. The name may
suggest ‘the Sparing Ones’, but that does not give an obvious sense, and Varro
may have been nearer the mark when he explained it as related to pario‘give
birth’; it may be contracted from Paricae. Their name then marks
them as goddesses who attend at a birth. Their individual names are given as
Nona, Decuma, and Morta, which may seem to express the blunt doctrine
that the child is born in the ninth month or the tenth, or dead.^18
Morta, however, may have had a wider reference. Livius Andronicus (fr. 23
Blänsdorf ) used her name in translating a verse of the Odyssey. The Homeric
line ‘when the dread μο4ρα of death strikes a man down’ became in Livius’
version ‘when the day arrives that Morta has proclaimed’,quando dies
adueniet quem profata Morta est. Morta appears here as the power that pre-
determines the date of an individual’s death by declaring it. It was natural
for Latin-speakers to hear ‘death’ in the name Morta. But in origin it was
very likely derived not from mer ‘die’ but, like Greek μο4ρα, from
*smer‘apportion’.^19
The Parcae, like the Moirai, spin threads of fate. Everyone who has read
Catullus’ poem 64 remembers the refrain from their song at the wedding of
Peleus and Thetis: currite ducentes subtegmina, currite fusi, ‘run on, spindles,
drawing out the threads for the weft’. It is possible that Catullus and other
Latin writers such as Ovid (Tr. 5. 3. 25) and Petronius (Sat. 29. 6) took over
the spinning image from Greek literature, and that it does not reflect native
tradition. But the Latin evidence is not crucial to the argument, as we find the
motif in various parts of barbarian Europe, not just in literature but in folk
(^16) The second of these appears as a title of the Moirai in a late Spartan inscription, IG v(1).
- 8 Μοιρ;ν Λαχσεων, and an apparent cognate Logetibas (dative plural) is taken to be
a Messapic name for the Fates: Krahe (1955–64), i. 23, 84; ii. 90 no. 139; Haas (1962), inscr.
B.1. 47.
(^17) Bernhard Schmidt, Das Volksleben der Neugriechen und das hellenische Alterthum, i (Leipzig
1871), 210–15; id., Griechische Märchen, Sagen und Volkslieder (Leipzig 1877), 67, 68, 98, 221;
J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge 1910), 121–30.
(^18) Va r r o , Res divinae fr. 12a Agahd ap. Gell. 3. 16. 9; Caesellius Vindex ap. Gell. 3. 16. 11.
(^19) The same root seems to appear with prepositional prefixes in the names of the Gaulish
goddesses of abundance Canti-smerta and Ro-smerta (Lambert (2003), 150). The Cantismertas
in the plural were perhaps equivalent to the Parcae (M. Lejeune).
- Mortality and Fame 381