If the single image thus explains these many expressions, there yet remains a passage, describing the assignment of fate, which is universally treated as standing alone and explained without reference to any part of the conception detailed. It is the account of the πίθοι of Zeus whence he gives ‘gifts’, fortunes good and evil, to mortals. The context has passed unnoticed.

The reflection begins explicitly with the conception of human fortunes as threads spun by the gods, and the manner of the giving is defined by an-expression (ἐπὶ τῷ θῆκε) which, as we have already seen, refers to the placing of the thread spun (μοĩρα or πεĩραρ) upon the individual. Elsewhere the gods are sometimes replaced by the personified Fates whose mode of creating human fortunes was, unquestionably, spinning, usually at birth, e.g.