The Moirai

The Fates

The Moirai, the Fates, govern the length and shape of every life: Clotho spins the thread, Lachesis measures it out, and Atropos cuts it when the time comes. Their parentage is told two different ways in Hesiod's own poem: first as daughters of Night alone, fatherless and outside the Olympian order entirely, and later, seven hundred lines on, as daughters of Zeus and Themis, brought formally inside it.

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