Definite Fate in Ancient Greece

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The ancient Greeks acknowledged the fact that fate has its own sense of reality outside the individual and spiritual that shapes and determines human life. Ancient Greeks, portrayed fate as a horrifying and indomitable force. They believed fate was the call of action of the gods — an unopposable reality that the oracle at Delphi revealed to many. Oedipus, in Oedipus at Colonus deliberates multiple times over fate, before being granted a blessing to Oedipus. “When He pronounced those many evils to me / He also said that, after a long time, this should be a resting place / That I would come to a final country, where I should find / A seat of the solemn gods and a refuge for strangers” (Oedipus at Colonus, lines 87-90). This is the oracle’s prophesied fate of Oedipus, saying that he will go through many trials and hardships but that he would also arrive to a resting place. Oedipus accepts this because he believes it’s his fate, and the hope of the refuge gives him strength through the hardships. Just like popular belief in ancient Greek culture, accepting one’s fate is the norm because fate is law and unchangeable.

Throughout this analysis, it is explicitly sighted that fate is an important concept towards Greek mythology. It is understood through Homer’s writings and other writers of the time that fate is a set and decided phenomenon that is unchangeable throughout the course of their lifetime. A god’s intervention has no effect on a person’s fate but tend to be the subject that runs the course of that fate. The Greek gods are the ones that hold the in-between outcome of each person’s fate. No matter what the circumstance is, fate is predetermined and will produce an outcome regardless. In all, neither gods nor humans can do anything to alter a person’s fate. People cannot try and alter their fate because in the end it returns to the same outcome and god’s are only able to prolong, aid, and ultimately lead to the finality of that person’s fate.

Works Cited

Homer, Robert Fagles, and Bernard Knox. The Iliad. London: Folio Society, 2006. Print.

Lopez-Ruiz, Carolina. Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths in Translation. New York: Oxford UP, 2017. Print.

Powell, Barry. Classical Myth. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2001. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. David Grene. Sophocles I. Second edition by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.