[617c]
who sat round about at equal intervals, each one on her throne, the
Fates,1 daughters of
Necessity, clad in white vestments with filleted heads, Lachesis, and
Clotho, and Atropos, who sang in unison with the music of the Sirens,
Lachesis singing the things that were, Clotho the things that are, and
Atropos the things that are to be. And Clotho with the touch of her right
hand helped to turn the outer circumference of the spindle, pausing from
time to time. Atropos with her left hand in like manner helped to turn the
inner circles, and Lachesis
1 Pictured in Michelangelo's Le Parche. Cf. Catullus 64. 306 ff.; Lowell, “Villa Franca”: “Spin, Clotho, spin, Lachesis twist and Atropos sever.”
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.