Zeus: I am not going to trouble you with requests for a fortune or a throne; you get prayers enough of that sort from other people, and from your habit of convenient deafness I gather that you experience a difficulty in answering them. But there is one thing I should like, which would cost you no trouble to grant.

Well, Cyniscus? You shall not be disappointed, if your expectations are as reasonable as you say.

I want to ask you a plain question.

Such a modest petition is soon granted; ask what you will,

Well then: you know your Homer and Hesiod, of course? Is it all true that they sing of Destiny and the Fates—that whatever they spin for a man at his birth must; inevitably come about?

Unquestionably. Nothing is independent of their control. From their spindle hangs the life of all created things; whose end is predetermined even from the moment of their birth; and that Jaw knows no change.

Then when Homer says, for instance, in another place, Lest unto Hell thou go, outstripping Fate, he is talking nonsense, of course?

Absolute nonsense. Such a thing is impossible: the law of the Fates, the thread of Destiny, is over all. No; so long as the poets are under the inspiration of the Muses, they speak truth: but once let those Goddesses leave them to their own devices, and they make blunders and contradict themselves. Nor can we blame them: they are but men; how should they know truth, when the divinity whose mouthpieces they were is departed from them?

That point is settled, then. But there is another thing I want toknow. There are three Fates, are there not,—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropus?

Quite so.

But one also hears a great deal about Destiny and Fortune. Who are they, and what is the extent of their power? Is it equal to that of the Fates? or greater perhaps? People are always talking about the insuperable might of Fortune and Destiny.

It is not proper, Cyniscus, that you should know all. But what made you ask me about the Fates?