ABSTRACT
When shining Themis, flushed with beauty, drew with her golden horses towards the stairway to Olympus, the gods and goddesses rejoiced. Already they revered her, and with her marriage to Zeus, something seemed to be fulfilled. Some even say she was brought by the Fates, those three workwomen who between them spin, weave and cut the thread of every human life. Others, not so willing perhaps to admit that there is a power older and stronger than even Zeus, father of gods and men, remember it differently: the Fates, they say, were the daughters of this union, and most particularly honoured by their father. But what seems sure is that there was something fated about Themis’s arrival among the golden thrones of Olympus – something as necessary and inescapable as the Fates themselves, and the great natural cycle of birth, flowering and death which they uphold.1
