Nature and form of the work
This book is a scholarly anthology of Greek philosophical texts on the subject of fate (Greek heimarmenē, Latin fatum), assembled and edited by the Dutch humanist and jurist Hugo Grotius (Huig de Groot, 1583–1645). As its Latin title indicates, it gathers together “what survives” (quae supersunt) in Greek of the writings on fate by several authors spanning many centuries of ancient and later Greek thought: Alexander of Aphrodisias, Ammonius son of Hermias, Plotinus, Bardaisan (Bardesanes) the Syrian, and George Gemistos Plethon. It belongs to the humanist genre of the edited classical compilation: a presentation of Greek source texts, in the tradition of Renaissance and early-modern philology, characteristically accompanied by a Latin rendering to make the material accessible to the learned readership of the period.
The organizing principle of the collection is thematic rather than chronological in the strict sense: all the included works treat, from differing philosophical and religious standpoints, the ancient debate over fate, necessity, providence, and human freedom. By bringing these texts under a single cover, the volume functions as a documentary dossier on one of the most enduring problems of Greek philosophy — the tension between determinism (whether Stoic, astrological, or providential) and the reality of human choice and moral responsibility.
Author and intellectual context
Hugo Grotius is best remembered as one of the founders of modern natural-law theory and international law, author of De iure belli ac pacis and Mare liberum, and as a leading figure in the religious and political controversies of the early Dutch Republic. Alongside this legal and theological career, however, Grotius was a formidable classical scholar and philologist of the humanist type, thoroughly trained in Greek and Latin from his precocious youth. He produced editions, translations, and commentaries on ancient authors, and he moved easily among the disciplines of law, theology, poetry, and classical philology that defined the erudite culture of his age.
An edited collection of Greek treatises on fate fits naturally into this side of Grotius’s activity. The problem of fate and free will stood at the intersection of the philosophical, theological, and moral concerns that occupied him throughout his life — questions of providence, necessity, divine foreknowledge, and human responsibility that were as urgent in the confessional debates of seventeenth-century Europe as they had been in antiquity. Grotius lived through the fierce theological disputes of his time over predestination and free will, and his humanist recovery of the ancient philosophical treatments of fate speaks to a mind for whom the classical past offered resources for perennial questions.
The authors and texts collected
The distinctiveness of the volume lies in the range of authorities it juxtaposes, each representing a different strand in the long history of thinking about fate.
Alexander of Aphrodisias was the most important ancient commentator on Aristotle, active around the turn of the second and third centuries AD and known as “the Exegete” for his authoritative interpretations of the Aristotelian corpus. His treatise On Fate (De fato) is one of the classic surviving statements of the Peripatetic case against Stoic determinism, arguing on Aristotelian grounds for the reality of contingency, of “what depends on us,” and of genuine human deliberation and choice against the notion that all events are fixed by an unbroken causal necessity. It is among the most substantial and philosophically influential ancient works on the subject.
Ammonius, son of Hermias, was a Neoplatonist philosopher of the Alexandrian school (late fifth and early sixth centuries AD), a pupil of Proclus and an influential teacher and commentator on Aristotle. His contribution to the theme belongs to the Neoplatonic engagement with the problem of future contingents and divine foreknowledge — the question, rooted in Aristotle’s On Interpretation, of how statements about future events can be true or false without rendering the future necessary, and how divine knowledge of future things is compatible with their contingency.
Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism in the third century AD, treated fate within his broader metaphysical system, in which the soul’s activity and the causality of the intelligible realm are set against the deterministic accounts of the Stoics and the astrologers. His reflections on fate address how the ordered causation of the cosmos leaves room for the freedom proper to the soul.
Bardaisan (Bardesanes) the Syrian (154–222 AD) was a Christian thinker and philosopher of Edessa associated with a celebrated argument against astrological determinism — the contention that the diversity of laws and customs among different peoples shows that human conduct is not fixed by the stars, since whole nations behave differently regardless of the heavens under which individuals are born. The Greek material connected with his teaching on fate stands in the volume as an early Christian and Near-Eastern voice in the debate, distinct from the Greek philosophical schools.
George Gemistos Plethon, the late Byzantine Platonist philosopher (c. 1355/1360–1452/1454), was the most prominent reviver of Platonism in the Greek world at the close of the Byzantine era and a figure who influenced the Platonic revival in Renaissance Italy. His treatment of fate reflects a strongly determinist, Platonizing metaphysics in which all things are governed by a providential and necessary order. His inclusion carries the anthology’s coverage from antiquity down to the eve of the Renaissance, showing the continuity of the Greek debate over fate into its latest phase.
The pairing of these authors is philosophically pointed: it sets defenders of contingency and free will (notably Alexander of Aphrodisias) alongside those who argue for a comprehensive providential or necessary order (notably Plethon), together with the Neoplatonic and Christian attempts to mediate between necessity, providence, and freedom.
Significance
The volume is significant chiefly as a monument of humanist philology and as a convenient early-modern gathering of the principal Greek sources on fate. By presenting these dispersed texts together in Greek with Latin translation, Grotius made available in a single collection the materials for studying the ancient and Byzantine controversy over fate, necessity, and free will — a controversy with deep resonance in the theological disputes of his own century. The work reflects both Grotius’s stature as a classical scholar and the enduring seventeenth-century preoccupation with reconciling divine providence and foreknowledge with human liberty. It remains a point of reference for the transmission and reception of these Greek treatises on fate.
