NECESSITY, in Mythology, a power superior to all other powers, and equally incapable of being resisted by gods or men. Herodotus, as quoted by Cudworth, mentions an oracle which declared that "God himself could not shun his destined fate;" and amongst the fragments of Philemon, collected by Le Clerc, we find the following sentence:
Δεῦρον βασιλεύς ἔπειτα, ὁ βασιλεύς ἦν, ἢ τὸν κινῶντα.
"We are subject to kings, kings are subject to the gods,
and God is subject to Necessity." Hence it is that, in the Iliad, we find Jove himself, the sire of gods and men, regretting that he was restrained by Necessity from rescuing his favourite son from the sword of Patroclus. Nay, to such a height was this impiety carried in the earliest ages of Greece, that we find Hesiod and Homer teaching that the gods themselves were generated by Necessity endangering with Night and Chaos.
This power, although always represented as blind and unintelligent, was, however, worshipped as a goddess, bearing in her hand large iron nails, and wedges, and anchors, and melted lead, as emblems of the inflexible severity of her nature. In the city of Corinth she had a temple, in which the goddess of Violence likewise resided, and into which no person was ever permitted to enter except the priest who officiated in sacris.
Learned men have exercised their ingenuity in vain attempts to trace this portentous notion to its origin. Some, who wished to interpret it in a pious sense, have supposed that the gods who are subject to necessity were only those who were the ministers of the supreme numen; and that by necessity itself nothing more was meant than divine providence. But this is not consistent with the generation of the gods according to Homer and Hesiod, nor with the epithets sæva necessitas, dura necessitas, by which this power was perpetually distinguished. Others, amongst whom may be mentioned Mosheim, have supposed that this monstrous fable was invented by the Pagan priests, and diligently inculcated upon the minds of the people, to excuse the villanies of the objects of their worship.