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.