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This story, besides illustrating well the finality of every word pronounced by the Fates and the means which they may employ to mitigate their own severity, is typical too of the ideas generally accepted concerning the Fates. Their number is three[280], and they are seen in the shape of old women, one of whom at least is always engaged in spinning. Of the remaining two, one is sometimes seen bearing a book wherein to record in writing the decrees which the three jointly utter, while the other carries a pair of scissors wherewith to cut the thread of life at the appointed time; or again sometimes these two also are spinning, one of them carrying a basket of wool or a distaff and the other fashioning the thread. This association of the Fates with spinning operations is commemorated in certain popular phrases by the comparison of man’s life to a thread. ‘His thread is cut’ or ‘is finished’ (κόπηκε or σώθηκε ἡ κλωστή του) is a familiar euphemism for ‘he is dead’: and again, with the same ultimate meaning but a somewhat different metaphor, the people of Arachova use the phrase μαζώθηκε τὸ κουβάρ’ του[281], ‘his spindle is wound full,’—an expression which seems to imply the idea that the Fates apportion to each man at birth a mass of rough wool from which they go on spinning day by day till the thread of life is completed.