Ananke

Q: Who was Ananke?

Ananke, whose name means “necessity” or “force”, was the Greek personification of necessity and of the compulsion that even the gods cannot escape. Her Roman equivalent is Necessitas.

Ananke, whose name means “necessity” or “force”, was the Greek personification of necessity and of the compulsion that even the gods cannot escape. Her Roman equivalent is Necessitas. In the surviving Greek literature she appears mostly as a power invoked by poets and philosophers rather than as the hero of a myth; the clearest picture of her is in Plato’s Myth of Er, where the spindle of the universe turns on her knees (Republic 10.616c–617e).

Necessity in Early Greek Poetry

Greek poets speak of Necessity as a force stronger than gods and men. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus says that he must bear his fate as lightly as he can, knowing that the strength of Necessity cannot be fought (Prometheus Bound 103–105). Later he says that “skill is far weaker than necessity”; asked who steers Necessity, he answers that it is the three Fates and the mindful Furies, and that not even Zeus can escape what is fated (Prometheus Bound 514–519). In a choral ode of Euripides’ Alcestis, the chorus declares that, having soared with the Muses and studied many teachings, it has found nothing stronger than Necessity, no remedy for her in the Thracian tablets written by Orpheus, nor in the drugs Apollo gave to the sons of Asclepius (Euripides, Alcestis 962–972). A shrine of Ananke stood on the Acrocorinth at Corinth, alongside one to Bia (Force), and Pausanias says that it was not the custom to enter it (Pausanias 2.4.6).

Family of Ananke

Children: Atropos (versions differ), Clotho (versions differ), Fates (versions differ), Lachesis (versions differ), The Fates (versions differ)

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Ananke and the Fates

Sources disagree about the parentage of the Fates, and Ananke is only one of the answers. Hesiod, in the passage on the children of Night, names the Moirai Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos among them, who give mortals both good and evil (Theogony 217–219). Later in the same poem he gives the Moirai to Zeus and Themis (Theogony 901–906). Plato in the Republic, however, calls them the daughters of Necessity: in the Myth of Er the three sit on thrones round the spindle, dressed in white, singing in harmony with the Sirens, Lachesis of what was, Clotho of what is, and Atropos of what will be (Republic 10.617b–d). In Plato, then, Ananke is the mother of the Fates, and the spindle on which all the heavenly circles turn rests on her knees (Republic 10.617b).

Aeschylus, by contrast, makes the Fates and the Furies the steersmen of Necessity (Prometheus Bound 515–516), so that the relationship of Ananke to the Fates is differently drawn by different authors.

The Spindle

In Plato’s vision the spindle of Necessity stretches from the ends of heaven, and all the orbits of the heavens turn through it. Its shaft and hook are of adamant and it carries eight whorls fitted one inside another; the whole spindle turns on the knees of Necessity (Republic 10.616c–617b).