To Homer she was not an absolute sovereign of both heaven and earth, to whom even the gods must bow; but merely apportioned the fate of men, as counseled by Deity. In the theology of Hesiod there were three: Clotho, the spinning fate; Lachesis, who assigned to man his fate; and Atropo, who decreed a fate that could not be avoided. This conception answered to the Teutonic Norns, or Weird Sisters. What was to the earlier poets of Greece a person, Æschylus apprehended as a principle; a law for both gods and men; an over-ruling, ever-present, inevitable necessity, against which it is vain to contend, and from which it is hopeless to escape. “His characters are pre-determined parricides, murderers and adulterers.” For instance, the destiny of the pious Amphiaraus led him to that death his wisdom foresaw; fate impelled him to the society his judgment forbade. Good Eteocles, too, lies under the band of fate, but seeks not to avert the doom. “Stern, uncompromising, he will meet the man he must slay, by whom he must himself fall.” The inexorable destiny of Æschylus was to Sophocles and Plato an ordering of the divine will. Two great schools of philosophy divided the educated opinion of classic Greece and Rome. The tenets of both were fatalistic in tendency. What was to the Epicurean a “chance” appealed to the Stoic as “law.” Man, taught Epicurus, is a mere buffet of a blind fatality. The phenomenon of life, said Stoicism, is governed with iron sway by an imminent necessity of reason. “Man should be free from passion,” preached Zeno, “unmoved by joy or grief, and submit without complaint to the unavoidable power by which all things are governed.” Buddhism is the doctrine taught by Gautama, the Hindoo sage, in the sixth century, B. C.; now the belief of a greater part of central and eastern Asia and the Indian Islands. In this creed, fatality is a cardinal principle. Sir Edwin Arnold has designated it “The Light of Asia.” The great religion of Brahma, also, teaches that everything is subject to a divinely appointed necessity. It boasts a philosophy that was the admiration of Bruno, Schelling, Hegel, and Draper. Manes declared that the moral universe was controlled by two supreme principles; one the author of all good, the other the author of all evil. The highest conception of Mohammed is an arbitrary and inexorable law. In the Koran we read: “No man can anticipate or postpone his end. Death will overtake us, even in lofty towers. From the beginning, God hath settled the place in which each man shall die.” The Persian poet sings: “The destinies ride their horses by night. No man can by flight escape his fate. Whether asleep in bed or in the storm of battle, the angel of death will find thee.” “I am convinced,” saith Ali, “that the affairs of men go by divine decree, and not by our administration.”