Fate

Fate, according to modern usage, is an agency or power that orders and predetermines a
future course of events. In the ancient world, the often inexplicable and unavoidable in the affairs
of human beings was attributed to fate. In Greek mythology, the goddesses known as the Fates,
or Moirae, spun out the destinies of men and women. With the resurgence of confidence in
human agency in fifth century Athens, the Greeks began to develop more subtle conceptions of
the relationship between fate and free will, especially through the tragedies of their theater,
which was grounded in religious ritual.
Sophocless OEDIPUS REX presents the classical treatment of human action as authored
by fate or free will, or a convergence of the two. Such a convergence is understandable through a
thought of Heraclitus, Mans character is his fate [daimn] (Fragment 119), or the more
familiar Character is destiny. Since demon (Gr. daimn) means both supernatural being and
ministering, or indwelling spirit (demon, OED 1a, 1b),1 the statement allows a convergence
of suprahuman and human agency, fate and free will. In other words, the guidance of our actions
derives from ourselves, our own character. Sophocless tragedy supremely illustrates this idea.
Oedipus, a prince of Corinth, led to doubts about his parentage by a stray comment from a
drunken man, goes to Delphi, where he consults the oracle, which tells him that he will kill his
father and marry his mother. Shocked by this prophecy, Oedipus immediately flees Corinth to
evade the oracle, the illogic and inconsistency of his actions never dawning upon him: 1)
regarding the unresolved question of parentage, he is fleeing the king and queen of Corinth, who
might not be his parents; and 2) regarding his contradictory attitude towards the oracle, he
believes in the oracle enough to react to its admonition but not enough to realize that he cannot
evade his foreknown destiny. His destiny, however, is not necessarily predetermined by the

powers above. Rather, his foreknowledge makes him act irrationally to fulfill his destiny. This
irrational conduct is part and parcel of his hubris, the overstepping of the bounds of human
conduct, as exhibited numerously in his killing of an older man (his real father) in a fit of alpha
male rage and his angry browbeating of both Creon, his trustworthy brother-in-law, and
Teiresias, the revered seer, when they tell him that he himself is the murderer of the former king
of Thebesto him preposterous but, nonetheless, the truth. Ironically, Oedipuss foreknowledge
drove him to fulfill the very prophecy that he was trying so hard to evade. Oedipus broke the two
cardinal rules of Greek ethics, which would guide one towards good destiny: Know thyself and
Nothing in excess. In his version of Oedipus, Sophocles turns the standard story of the futility
of trying to evade an inevitable fate dictated by the gods and transforms it into a veritable
tragedy of a human agent through his own character flaws and actions.
In a further exploration of fate and autonomy, human action, expanded to the civic
enterprise in Virgils THE AENEID, translates itself into a founding myth, whereby personal
good yields to the larger civic good of nation formation. It is Aeneas, fleeing to Italy after the fall
of Troy, who, according to prophecy, will there found a noble and courageous race, which in time
will surpass all other existing nations. At the same time, the fate of Aeneas and his descendants,
the Romans, is influenced by the actions of gods, particularly in the conflict between Venus and
Juno, who respectively support and hinder the Roman enterprise for reasons that go back
mythically to Priams son, Pariss choosing Venus, goddess of love, as the most beautiful over
Hera, goddess of marriage, and Athena, goddess of wisdom. Thus, in this nationalistic epic,
divine agency and human aspirationboth personal and civicconstitute fate. Aeneas is the
epitome of Roman piety, the loyalty and devotion towards ones homeland, family, and father,
and his fate is synonymous with the future of Rome. In his wanderings, Aeneas finds shelter in

Africa in the hands of the sympathetic Dido, the queen of Carthage. Later, the two fall in love
and consummate their union. Aeneas is torn between his desire for a woman and his patriotic
love: hic amore, haec patria est (There is my love, there my country [4.537]). Ultimately
both divine pressure and a sense of civic duty, as solemnized by prophecy, compel Aeneas to
leave Dido, choosing Roma and its implicit amor (Roma spelled backwards) of patria as his
destiny.
Virgil wrote his epic during a period of civil war and political and moral chaos in Rome
after the fall of the Republic. Accordingly, THE AENEID reflects an attempt to recuperate
Roman greatness by appealing to its mythic history and its grounding moral values of piety,
virtue, and constancy. At the same time, it forwarded political ideology, which could be used
beyond Virgils moral aims to justify imperialistic aims in the aggrandizement of the Roman
empire. In more modern times, the Manifest Destiny, in the history of American expansion,
worked in similar fashion to appropriate native American land and to exploit indigenous people,
in a divinely ordained mission to spread republic democracy. Both examples readily show how
human beings have exploited divine agency and otherwise manipulated fate and destiny towards
self-interest.
As in the previously discussed works, the classical trope of suprahuman prophecy figures
importantly in Shakespeares MACBETH to advance plot and human intention. Unlike
OEDIPUS REX and THE AENEID, both of which revolve around a single, defining prophecy,
Shakespeares tragedy operates with two, one propelling the mount and the other underwriting
the fall. The prophecy of the three witches (a spin-off of the Fates) incites the protagonist into
evil in the first half of the play and then symmetrically in the second half the suddenly unveiled
prophecy regarding MacDuff seals Macbeths defeat and death. Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, and

his companion, Banquo, come upon three witches on the heath who respectively address
Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and king hereafter (1.3.48). To Banquo, they
enounce the following occult prophecy: "Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. . . . /Not so happy,
yet much happier. . . . /Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none" (63-65).
With the partial fulfillment of the prophecy, his becoming Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth is
tempted against his better reason by the further fruits of vaulting ambition (1.7.27): kingship.
When the she-man, Lady Macbeth, accuses him of unmanly cowardice in her infamous speech
(of how shed [pluck her] nipple from [her babys] boneless gums, /And dash'd the brains out
[1.7.57-58]), she lends Macbeth the balls to kill the king. Though Macbeth chidingly affirms the
moral position, I dare do all that may become a man; /Who dares do more is none (46-47), he,
nonetheless, goes along with their plan of regicide, crossing from honor to villainy.
After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth becomes king in his place, but the more he tries,
like Oedipus, to adhere to the prophecy, the more it eludes him. Hence, one murder leads to
further: he has Banquo killed to insure the crown for his progeny rather than Banquos as the
witches foretold. Again like Oedipus, Macbeth both acts upon and acts against the prophecy in
ardent contradiction, incited by momentary megalomania, sealed by the murderous deed, and,
thereafter, the will never to submit in the downward spiral of violence and death. Towards the
fulfilling of the witches prophecy drive the events of further carnage fatefully and fatally with a
peculiar vitality of their owna concatenation of one violent act igniting the next. Ultimately,
Macbeths final end comes in a showdown in act 5, scene 10 with Macduff, the man of no
woman born (5.10.31) the only man whom, according to the witches prophecy, Macbeth must
fear. Presenting itself as the fulfillment of fate, the duel between Macbeth and Macduff can also
be seen, like the other preceding cases, as an example of self-fulfilling prophecy. The future

event materializes not so much through the agency of higher powers but more often through a
human beings reactions to the foreknowledge of the future event. In Macbeths case, it is less
superhuman agency that controls the outcome, but wearied Macbeth himself, who, finally facing
his nemesis, is psyched out by Macduff, who fights him with invincible fury to avenge the deaths
of his wife and children.
In ROMEO AND JULIET, where fate again plays a defining role to induce tragedy, it
works as a force of fortuity obstructing the best intentions of human beings. In Shakespeares
earlier tragedy about star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliets problems lie in that they have been
born into two families engaged in an age-old feud. The deaths of the young lovers might have
been prevented had there not been a plague, which kept Friar John from properly informing
Romeo that Juliet was under a spell of fake death. Then they might have succeeded in living
peacefully apart from their families. But such an outcome might not have effectuated an end to
the feud that the chastening deaths of the two lovers apparently seem to have induced. Despite
the role of fortuity in the tragic outcome, the more defining accountability rests in the human
agents themselves. To this effect, the plague, seemingly fortuitous, symbolizes precisely the
moral rottenness of the feud. In all these works with the exception of THE AENEID, fate presents
divine agency as muted, passively present, or altogether absent in the affairs of human beings.
The emphasis, rather, is that events emerge through deliberate human action upon the plane of
fortuity. Such a conception prefigures the twentieth-century philosophy of existentialism, which
affirms a human beings freedom to act and her accountability for her choices, despite the
nihilism to which random, meaningless, absurd events may lend themselves.
Lastly, Suzan-Lori Parkss twentieth-first century, Pulitizer prize-winning play,
Topdog/Underdog further explores the themes of fate and free will through the experience of two

African-American brothers struggling to get by and to get ahead, the tragi-comic absurdity of
their underclass existence deftly balanced with the burdens of mythology and history upon their
autonomy. Their father, in a gesture of whim, named the brothers Lincoln and Booth, predicating
the antagonism that will plague their interaction within their instinctive alliance to assist each
other in the plight of the African-American man: the dearth of opportunity. Thus, they wrestle in
the age-old struggle of Cain and Abel, representing the eternal clash between the topdog and
underdog as both individuals and subgroups of society. Lincoln (Link) emancipates2 himself
from his former lucrative but dangerous life as a three-card monte hustler, and, instead,
ludicrously becomes an black impersonator of Lincoln in an amusement park game, whereby he
gets repeatedly assassinated by all the Booths in the world who have an axe tuh grind (46).
Like President Lincoln, who single-handedly freed the slaves, Link tries to free his younger
brother from the enthrallment of three-card monteunsuccessfully because like his namesake,
he cannot offer Booth viable opportunities of gainful employment. His efforts to protect Booth
only appear as actions of a rival and inexorably lead the two into a fatal face-off in the three-card
monte. As with all the works previously discussed, here again in Topdog/Underdog, it is
individual action based on characteral disposition, induced by the psychological, emotional, and
economic urgencies of the dramatic moment, that bring Lincoln and Booth to the self-fulfilling
prophecy presaged by fate, myth, and history.

See also: HAMLET, JUDE THE OBSCURE, TESS OF THE DURBERVILLES

UNHAE LANGIS

Bibliography
Heraclitus. The Complete Fragments: Translation and Commentary and the Greek Text. Trans.
William Harris. 4 April 2006. <http://www.community.middlebury.edu/
~harris/Philosophy/heraclitus.pdf>.
Parks, Suzan-Lori. Topdog/Underdog. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999, 2001.
Shakespeare. Macbeth. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E.
Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997.
Virgil. The Aeneid. 1 February 2009. <http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/aen4.shtml>.

See also Alan Hefner, who defines daimon as divine power," "fate" or "god."
<http://www.pantheon.org/articles/d/daimon.html> 1 February 2009.
2
I am indebted to my student Jacqueline Baird for this insight.