Pseudo-Plutarch

Let us briefly consider two Middle Platonist authors, one Greek (Pseudo-Plutarch) and one Latin (Apuleius), and their descriptions of the relationship between providence and fate. In a late-first or second-century de Fato treatise erroneously attributed to Plutarch, the anonymous Middle Platonist author responded to his patron Piso s request for an explanation of the nature and scope of heimarmene Fate, he explains, could have two aspects, as v pysia that acted upon matter, or as substance (ouda) de Fato... 

The first issue to challenge the Middle Platonists was the precise relationship between fate and providence. Apuleius and Pseudo-Plutarch had s olved the problem of evil by relegating heimarmene to a lower aspect of the divine principle of pronoia. Yet the farther one moved from the divine source in the chain of cosmic emanations, the more room that opened up for the capricious or even deleterious effects of planetary gods and daimones upon humans. To complicate the issue further, Platonist philosophers needed to define and reconcile heimarmene and pronoia with the related causal principles of chance (tuxv)), and necessity (dvdcyxy)). 

Proclus of Constantinople. Ad si n iitos occidentis episcopos. PG 65. Pseudo-Plutarch. Peri heimarmene. In Plutarch, Moralia. Vol. 7. Edited by Phillip H. de Lacy. LCL. London Heinemann, 1959. 

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