Book 7
2
How Chrysippus also maintained the power and inevitable nature of fate, but at the same time declared that we had control over our plans and decisions.
2
CHRYSIPPUS, the leader of the Stoic philosophy, defined fate, which the Greeks call ei(marme/nh, in about the following terms: Fr. ii. 1000, Arn. Fate, he says, is an eternal and unalterable series of circumstances, and a chain rolling and entangling itself through an unbroken series of consequences, from which it is fashioned and made up. But I have copied Chrysippus' very words, as exactly as I could recall them, in order that, if my interpretation should seem too obscure to anyone, he may turn his attention to the philosopher's own language. For in the fourth book of his work On Providence, he says that ei(marme/nh is an orderly series, established by nature, of all events, following one another and joined together from eternity, and their unalterable interdependence.
