CHAPTER III.
The Destinies; or, The Reign of Law.
On one occasion, an aged scholar soliloquized as follows: “Homer was at the same time beggar and poet: his mouth more often filled with verses than with bread. Plautus turned a mill that he might live. Menander, Cratinus and Terrence were drowned; Empedocles lost in the crater of Mount Etna; Euripides and Heraclitus torn to pieces by dogs; Hesiod, Archilochus and Ibychus, murdered. Sappho threw herself from a precipice. Condemned by a tyrant, respectively, Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius Arbiter, cut their veins and bled to death. Poison terminated the lives of Socrates, Demosthenes and Lucretius.
“In Plutarch, we read of ‘two eminent persons, whose names were Attis, the one a Syrian, the other of Arcadia, both were slain by a wild boar; of two, whose names were Acteon, one was torn to pieces by his dog, the other by assassins; of two famous Scipios, one overthrew the Carthagenians in war, the other totally destroyed them; four of the most warlike commanders of antiquity had but one eye—Philip, Antigonous, Hannibal and Sertorius.’
“Paul Borghese, a writer of rhythmic verse, died of starvation. Tasso, himself the most amiable of poets, lived like a pauper, and passed away in an asylum. Bentivoglio, a creator of classic comedies, in the misery of his old age, was refused admittance to an hospital he had founded. Cervantes died of hunger, and Camoens ended his days in an almshouse. The body of Vaugelas was disposed of to surgeons that his debts might be paid. Spencer was forsaken and neglected in his old age. Decker, Cotten, Savage and Lloyd breathed their last in jails.
“Might not these men have said, ‘Who can shut out fate?’ Were they the sport of circumstances, or could circumstances have been made their sport? Was each independent of fatality? Was he free from destiny; or, was he subject to an unalterable course—an invincible necessity?”
The query of this venerable sage has been that of civilized man in every age. Coming into the world with the dawn of philosophy, it will remain until the veil of Isis is uplifted. Profoundest wisdom has ever taught the subordination of man to a higher law, by which his career is largely determined from the beginning. Investigation will disclose that such, to-day, is the real opinion of a vast majority of mankind.
The thought was ascendant in the literature and religion of the ancient Greeks. Their Moira was a personification of law; the Goddess of Destiny, who assigned to everyone his fate, or “share.” At the birth of man she spun the thread of his future life, pursued his footsteps, and directed the consequences of his actions, according to the decrees of Zeus. By some she was conceived as a fatal divinity, who directed human affairs in such a manner as to restore the right proportions or equilibrium, wherever it had been disturbed; who measured out happiness and unhappiness, and allotted losses and sufferings to him who was blest with too frequent gifts of Fortune, to the end he might be humbled into acknowledging the existence of bounds beyond which human happiness cannot proceed with safety.
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.”