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Sarah McLean

Fate in Greek Mythology and Religion

Updated: Jul 6, 2023

Fate and free will aren't as diametrically opposed as you might think.




Every Classics student has to answer this question concerning the Iliad or Oedipus Tyrannus or something like that, because the tension between fate and free will is an important theme in a lot of Ancient Greek literature. What a lot of Classics students miss, however, is that fate and free will are not mutually exclusive. We’ve got this idea… I don’t know if this is an American thing, or if it’s a Christian thing, or what, but we’ve got this idea that fate and free will are diametrically opposed. If everything is predetermined, then you can never decide the path of your own life. If you have the ability to choose, then that must mean that nothing is predetermined. Like most opposites, fate and free will are not actually so incompatible. They can coexist, and even reconcile.


Christianity doesn’t really have a proper analogue to the pagan concept of fate. Predestination is similar, but not exactly the same: it is the idea that God makes all the decisions about you and your life before you exist, so you can never decide anything for yourself. The pagan idea of fate is a little less “all of your choices are made for you” and a little more “all of your choices will lead you here,” i.e. destiny is not where you’re going, destiny is where you end up. That’s a small but important distinction. Pagan gods are not omniscient, and usually have destinies of their own, though it can work a little differently for them than it does for humans. Only the gods who personify Fate can control it. The rest may be able to know the fate of all things, but they have limited ability to mess with it (either because they literally can’t, or because it will screw up the natural order). What they definitely don’t do is “mind-control” humans. They do not force humans to do anything, or make all their decisions for them. Even the Fates don’t do this — they know what choices you will make, but they don’t make those choices for you. The best explanation I’ve ever seen about how this works is from Blood of Zeus of all things. There’s an episode in which the protagonist goes to visit the Moirai, who explain this to him with the metaphor of a baby crawling across a table. You, the adult watching, know that the baby will fall when it reaches the end of the table. But the baby still has free will to move forward or not. Oedipus Tyrannus puts you in the position of the adult watching the baby on the table, a position similar to that of the gods — you know who’s responsible for Thebes’ trouble and why, but you have to watch the train wreck that ensues as Oedipus figures it out.


The big question of Oedipus Tyrannus is to what extent Oedipus’ downfall is his own fault. It’s kind of ironic that there’s so much conflicting discourse over this question, because it’s literally answered in the play:

And all these curses I — no one but I brought down these piling curses on myself! —906–7

Yes, Oedipus’ downfall is his own fault, and he blames himself. But how can that be, when he is predestined to kill his father and marry his mother? When Oedipus initially consulted the oracle of Delphi, Apollo rebuked him as though he was already tainted with miasma for a crime he hasn’t committed yet, and tells Oedipus that he will kill his father and marry his mother. If he’d never heard the prophecy about that, Oedipus would never have left Corinth, and none of the events leading up to the play would have happened. Therefore, it seems as though Apollo’s demand to remove the source of miasma at the start of the play is a catch-22: Apollo punishes Oedipus for something he never could have avoided in the first place, something that Apollo himself directed Oedipus towards with the prophecy. Oedipus even acknowledges that Apollo is the ultimate source of his suffering:

Apollo, friends, Apollo — he ordained my agonies — these, my pains on pains!" —1467–68

So why isn’t it Apollo’s fault that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother? Because it was Oedipus’ own decision to respond to the prophecy by leaving Corinth. He never considered that the King and Queen of Corinth weren’t his real parents, so, deliberately distancing himself from his adoptive parents brought him closer to his real parents (too close, in fact). It was also his reckless decision to kill Laius on the road. Oedipus could have taken the more reasonable option, but he didn’t, and the gods already knew that he wouldn’t. Oedipus’ own choices would lead him to kill his father and marry his mother, irregardless. The prophecy didn’t make him do those things. The prophecy did not make him do anything. A prophecy is essentially a historical account of something that has not happened yet. Like any account, it describes what happens. Gods don’t distinguish between the past, the present, and the future, so fate is simply what happens, and prophecies describe what happens. But we humans, with our concept of linear time, think of everything in terms of cause and effect, so we assume that fate causes us to make certain decisions or that our decisions cause particular outcomes. It’s actually neither, and both.


The last time I read Oedipus Tyrannus and thought through all of this, I asked Apollo what fate was. The first response I got was a non-answer. When I get non-answers, it’s usually because the actual answer is too complicated to express in a way that I would understand. I pressed, and after getting the sense that I was being asked, “You really wanna know?”, I was shown a vision. It was of a massive interconnected web, sort of like a nervous system, with “electrical” pulses travelling along each of the “neurons.” The first thing I thought of was the Dark Dimension from Doctor Strange. It also looked sort of like visual maps of the Internet.


This web was that of Fate, and the electrical pulses represented all the causes and effects in the universe, or perhaps the multiverse. Every decision that anyone makes, every time a random or uncontrollable event influences a hundred others, how the actions and intentions of every being in existence interact with everything else that exists. It was overwhelming. I understood immediately that I could never possibly be able to “read” this map. I could never understand all of the ways that everything affects everything else. And I also felt a sense of relief that it wasn’t my responsibility to figure all that out. Gods can make sense of all of that because they’re gods. Accepting that I can never understand Fate has given me a greater understanding of it. It is so much more complicated than cause and effect.


That’s all my own personal beliefs. It doesn’t say anything about what the Ancient Greeks believed. But in their case, it is still more complicated than the dichotomy of “free will” and “mind control.” It is inaccurate to perceive the Greek gods either as cruel or as justified. They are neither. They do not work purely in the interests of humanity, but they also do not toy with human lives for sport. They simply are, and humans worship them in order to gain their favor, blessings in exchange for sacrifices and devotion. Fate is the divine order of the universe, and it is truly impossible for a human mind to comprehend, so the best that humans can do is worship the gods respectfully.

Destiny guide me always Destiny find me filled with reverence pure in word and deed. —954–56



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