SVF II.913

Original — Ancient Greek

Χρύσιππος δύναμιν πνευματικὴν τὴν οὐσίαν τῆς εἱμαρμένης, τάξει τοῦ παντὸς διοικητικήν. Τοῦτο μὲν οὖν ἐν τῷ δευτέρῳ Περὶ κόσμου. Ἐν δὲ τῷ δευτέρῳ Περὶ ὅρων καὶ ἐν τοῖς Περὶ τῆς εἱμαρμένης καὶ ἐν ἄλλοις σποράδην πολυτρόπως ἀποφαίνεται λέγων· “Εἱμαρμένη ἐστὶν ὁ τοῦ κόσμου λόγος” ἢ “λόγος τῶν ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ προνοίᾳ διοικουμένων” ἢ “λόγος καθ᾽ ὃν τὰ μὲν γεγονότα γέγονε, τὰ δὲ γινόμενα γίνεται, τὰ δὲ γενησόμενα γενήσεται.”

StoicOs Translation

Chrysippus (calls) the substance of fate a pneumatic power, administering the universe by order. This in the second book On the Cosmos. But in the second book On Definitions, in the books On Fate and elsewhere he declares it in scattered places and many ways, saying: 'Fate is the logos of the cosmos', or 'the logos of the things in the cosmos administered by providence', or 'the logos according to which what has come to be has come to be, what is coming to be is coming to be, and what will come to be will come to be.'

Context

Stobaeus' chapter on fate assembles the school definitions; for Chrysippus he cites, exceptionally, three books by title and quotes three formulas verbatim — a rare glimpse of the systematiser defining the same concept across works.

Source notes:Text verified against von Arnim, SVF II (1903), no. 913, pp. 264–265 (OCR of the scanned edition; von Arnim prints Stobaeus' text in a lunate-sigma face, here normalised). The chapter is Stobaeus' section on fate (Wachsmuth p. 79); book titles as transmitted.

What the source actually tells us

Named attribution with book titles (On the Cosmos II, On Definitions II, On Fate) and quotation marks in the source: the three logos-formulas are presented as Chrysippus' own words. The pneumatic-power definition matches Stoic physics as reported elsewhere.

Philosophical meaning

Fate is not a foreign force but the world's own reason: physically a pneumatic tension ordering the whole, logically the account by which past, present and future hold together. Providence and fate name one administration — the doctrine Cleanthes sang, Chrysippus defines.

Scholarly uncertainty

Stobaeus (or his source Arius Didymus?) compresses; the framing sentence is doxographic, and quotation marks in an anthology are no guarantee of letter-perfect wording. The chapter locus is cited here after Wachsmuth's pagination as printed by von Arnim.

Go deeper

• Read SVF II.1000 — fate defined in Chrysippus' own Greek (Gellius) →
• Read SVF I.527 — Cleanthes: Lead me, Zeus, and you, Destiny →