The concept of fate or destiny is widely recognised in modern culture, with some people believing that everything is predestined. This belief also existed in Ancient Greece, and the concept was personified with the belief that the Moirai, or Fates as they were also known, controlled everything that happened in a man’s life.

The Moirai are generally considered to be the offspring of Nyx, the primordial goddess of the night; indeed Hesiod in the Theogony gives this parentage. Confusingly though Hesiod also names Zeus and Themis as their parents; Zeus and Themis being the personifications of the justice and the natural order.

Other sources though also claim that the Fates were offspring of Chaos, Oceanus and Gaia, Ananke, or Erebus and Nyx.

In most sources there was considered to be three Moirai; who were normally depicted as elderly women.

The three Moirai were, Klotho, who spun the thread of life, Lakhesis, who measured how long the thread was to be, and Atropos, who cut the thread at the end of the life. Everything that occurred upon the journey of life was also predestined. Thus the Moirai were goddesses of birth, but also goddesses of death.

Anyone who tried to interfere with this predestination would encounter the wrath of the Moirai, who would send the Erinyes (the Furies) to deal with the transgressor.

The Fates were said to rule over man and god alike, although Zeus is often given the epitaph of Zeus Moiragetes, leader of the Fates; the suggestion being that Zeus could in some way control the Moirai. Famously though it is Hera who asks the Fates to delay the birth of Heracles, something they are seemingly willing to do.

Zeus on the other hand is willing to let the Fates have their way and does nothing to interfere with the natural order of things; allowing Sarpedon and Hector to die on the battlefield of Troy despite his own contemplations about saving them from their fate. 

Zeus does ask that Pelops is restored to life when he is killed by his father, Tantalus, and served as a meal to the gods. Likewise Apollo asked that King Admetus be excused from his time of death. It could of course be that the Fates had predestined that the gods would intervene when Pelops and Admetus were initially due to die.

The other famous story of life that involves the Fates was when the centaur Chiron was poisoned by one of Heracles’ poisoned arrows. Chiron was immortal and so could not be killed, but was instead wracked with intense pain from the poison. The Moirai agreed that the centaur could give up his immortality to relieve himself from the pain.

In mythological tales, the Moirai were aligned with Zeus, and were even said to have fought alongside the supreme deity in the Gigantomachy and also the revolt of Typhon. The Moirai were also useful to Zeus when it came to prophecies, as it was the three sisters who warned that the sons of Metis and Thetis would be stronger than their father. In the first case Zeus circumvented the prophecy by swallowing Metis, and in the second passed it on to another by having Thetis married off to Peleus.

The Fates are an interesting concept, and possibly quite contradictory, if everything is predestined, then the judgement in the underworld about how the life was led, would appear superfluous.