 The Stoics held that all things come about by fate. Fate they define as ‘the ordered series of causes, when cause joined to cause brings about each thing, ceaselessly flowing for eternity’ (Cicero De divinatione I 125; Gellius Noctes Atticae 7.2.1-3 = L&amp;S 55 K). To maintain that all things are fated in this context is to hold that every event is the effect of antecedent causes sufficient to bring it about. In other words, the Stoics were determinists. And they accepted some of the familiar implications of determinism, e.g, that a sufficiently powerful intellect with a complete grasp of the state of the world would be able to predict every future event (De divinatione I 127 = LS 55 O). They also confronted the familiar problems that determinism seems to present. If human beings are parts of a deterministic universe and their every action is the pre-determined effect of causes antecedent to their existence, there is a plausible argument that all our actions are involuntary, that as it was often put in the ancient debate, nothing is up to us or in our power. In no case could we have done other than what we did. And from this it would seem to follow that we are not responsible for our actions and, with this, that there is no scope for blame or punishment, which presuppose that we can be held morally responsible for at least some of what we do. They solved this problem to their own satisfaction by defending the first properly articulated  compatibilist theory,  according to which voluntary action is compatible with determinism.