Lead me, O Zeus

The four lines with which Epictetus closes the Enchiridion: "have these ready at hand on every occasion". He does not name their author; the attribution to Cleanthes comes from Seneca, who gives a Latin rendering of them in his 107th letter.

It is a prayer built oddly. It asks for nothing and promises nothing; it acknowledges what has already been settled. The man does not choose where he is going — only whether he goes willingly. Both halves arrive at the same place.

Everything rests on the last line. "I shall become base — and follow all the same" offers neither comfort nor threat, only bare mechanics: resistance does not cancel what is assigned, it merely spoils the one who resists. Hence Seneca's famous addition to his Latin version, which is not in Cleanthes: *ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt* — "the fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling".

The address is double: Zeus and Pepromene, the Appointed. For the Stoa these are not two persons — the law of the cosmos and the god who steers it are one and the same, and so the verb stands in the plural: "wherever I have been assigned by you both".

The same author's long hymn is the card cleanthes-zeus-001; there the same thought runs to thirty-seven lines and ends not in submission but in a request for understanding.