Clotho

Greek fate language is craft language before it is theology. A moira is a portion, the part that falls to somebody when a thing is divided, and it is used of a share of meat at a feast long before it is used of a lifespan. Clotho is the point at which that portion is manufactured. Her name comes from the ordinary verb for spinning, and spinning in Greek life is domestic, continuous, and done by women: fibre is drawn from a distaff, twisted onto a spindle, and wound. The metaphor is old enough that Homer can speak of what was spun for a man on the day his mother bore him without needing to explain it, which suggests the image came first and the three goddesses were fitted to it afterwards.

What the image carries is a specific idea about how a life is limited. A thread is not cut short by accident; it is made to a length, and the length is settled while it is being made. That is why Clotho belongs at the beginning of the sequence rather than at the end, and why she is the one invoked at births and, in some places, at marriages. Both are moments at which an allotment is being fixed rather than run out.

In art she is grave rather than beautiful, usually shown with distaff or spindle, standing with her two sisters. Rome absorbed the group as the Parcae and gave them counting names, Nona, Decima and Morta, the ninth month, the tenth month and death, which is the same structure rendered as a calendar of gestation rather than a piece of thread.

Plato gives the three sisters their most elaborate setting, and it is one in which Clotho is not a weaver at a loom but an operator of the cosmos. In the myth of Er at the close of the Republic the three sit on thrones at equal intervals around a great spindle turning in the lap of Necessity. Lachesis sings of what was, Clotho of what is, and Atropos of what will be. Clotho lays her right hand on the outer circumference of the whorl and helps it turn, Atropos touches the inner circles with her left, and Lachesis takes hold of both in turn.

The division of labour is exact and it is not the one the older poets used. Clotho has the present, and the present is the whole outer sphere, the fixed stars, the movement that carries everything else with it. She confirms what has been chosen rather than choosing it: in the myth a soul picks its own next life before Lachesis, and it is then brought to Clotho, who ratifies the choice under her hand, and only afterwards to Atropos, who makes the spun thread unalterable. Plato has kept the three names and the sequence and quietly moved the responsibility onto the person whose life it is.

Cult treated her more simply. Greek practice approached the Moirai at the thresholds of a life rather than through large public festivals, and the offerings recorded for them are the modest ones appropriate to a household observance rather than a civic one. The philosophical picture and the domestic one sat side by side without either replacing the other.