Parcae- Roman GroupCollective"The Three Fates"

The Spinning

The Parcae were born from Nox, the primordial Night, before the cosmos had its order. Aulus Gellius records their names: Nona, for the ninth month of pregnancy; Decuma, for the tenth by Roman counting; Morta, whose name needs no explanation.

Nona draws the thread from her spindle at the moment of birth. Decuma measures its length. Morta cuts it. The thread is the life. Some are long, some barely a handspan. When Morta's shears close, no power in the cosmos can open them again.

The Wedding Song

In Catullus's longest poem, the Parcae appear at the wedding of Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis. The three sisters sit at the feast, spinning, their aged bodies wrapped in white robes bordered with purple. The spindles turn in their fingers as they sing.

What they sing is the future of the child who will be born from this marriage: Achilles. They prophesy his speed, his slaughter of Trojans, the river Scamander choked with bodies. They prophesy the sacrifice of Polyxena on his tomb. The refrain returns after each stanza: "Run, spindles, run, drawing the weft-threads of fate." The song does not separate glory from horror. It weaves them on the same thread.

Even Jupiter

In the Aeneid, when Venus begs Jupiter to protect Aeneas, Jupiter does not promise his own power. He promises what the Parcae have decreed. "Fata viam invenient." The Fates will find a way.

When Turnus falls in the final book, his thread has run out. When Dido dies, the thread was always going to end on that pyre. Virgil's characters struggle and grieve, but behind every outcome stands the thread that was spun before they were born.