[133:2] Cf. also his Consolatio ad Apollonium. The earliest text is perhaps the interesting fragment of Demetrius of Phalerum (fr. 19, in F. H. G. ii. 368), written about 317 b. c. It is quoted with admiration by Polybius xxix. 21, with reference to the defeat of Perseus of Macedon by the Romans:
'One must often remember the saying of Demetrius of Phalerum . . . in his Treatise on Fortune. . . . "If you were to take not an indefinite time, nor many generations, but just the fifty years before this, you could see in them the violence of Fortune. Fifty years ago do you suppose that either the Macedonians or the King of Macedon, or the Persians or the King of Persia, if some God had foretold them what was to come, would ever have believed that by the present time the Persians, who were then masters of almost all the inhabited world, would have ceased to be even a geographical name, while the Macedonians, who were then not even a name, would be rulers of all? Yet this Fortune, who bears no relation to our method of life, but transforms everything in the way we do not expect and displays her power by surprises, is at the present moment showing all the world that, when she puts the Macedonians into the rich inheritance of the Persian, she has only lent them these good things until she changes her mind about them." Which has now happened in the case of Perseus. The words of Demetrius were a prophecy uttered, as it were, by inspired lips.'
[134:1] Eur., Tro. 886. Literally it means 'The Compulsion in the way Things grow'.
[134:2] Zeno, fr. 87, Arnim.
[135:1] Chrysippus, fr. 913, Arnim.
[135:2] Cleanthes, 527, Arnim. Ἂγου δέ μ', ὦ Ζεῦ, καὶ σύ γ' ἡ Πεπρωμένη, κτλ. Plotinus, Enn. iii. i. 10.
[135:3] Epicurus, Third Letter. Usener, p. 65, 12 = Diog. La. x. 134.
[136:1] Aristotle, fr. 12 ff.
[136:2] e. g. Chrysippus, fr. 1076, Arnim.
[138:1] Themis, p. 180, n. 1.