THE ART AND THOUGHTOF HERACLITUS

The art and thoughtofHeraclitusAn edition of the fragments withtranslation and commentaryCHARLES H. KAHNProfessor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania

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Cambridge University Press 1979

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication dataHeraclitusThe art and thought of Heraclitus.1. Philosophy, AncientI. Title II. Kahn, Charles H.182'.4 B220.E5

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Contents

PrefaceBibliography and abbreviations

General introduction1 The man, the time and the place2 The book3 The doctrine: Heraclitus and his predecessors

Introductory note to text and translationThe fragmentsOn reading HeraclitusCommentary on the fragmentsAppendicesI Dubious quotations from HeraclitusII Doxographic reportsIII Heraclitus and the Orient, apropos of a recent book

by M.L. West

NotesConcordancesIndexes1 General index2 Index of Passages discussed

IX

xiii1139

25

27

87

96

288290

297

303

341

349353

Preface

Heraclitus was a great prose artist, one of the most powerful stylistsnot only of Greek antiquity but of world literature. He was also amajor thinker, perhaps the only pre-Socratic philosopher whosethought is of more than historical interest today. His reflections uponthe order of nature and man's place within it, upon the problems oflanguage, meaning and communication still seem profound; andmany of his insights will remain illuminating for the modern reader,not merely for the specialist in ancient thought.

The aim of the present work is to demonstrate the truth of theseclaims by making Heraclitus accessible to contemporary readers as aphilosopher of the first rank. With this in mind I have tried to re-arrange the fragments in a meaningful order, to give a translation thatreflects as far as possible the linguistic richness of the original, and toprovide a commentary designed to make explicit the wealth of mean-ing that cannot be directly conveyed in a translation but is latent inHeraclitus' own words, in his tantalizing and suggestive form ofenigmatic utterance.

The Greek text is given here together with the translation, sinceany interpretation is obliged to make continual reference to the orig-inal wording. And I think it should be possible to read the fragmentsin a meaningful order, even if one reads them in Greek. No attempthas been made to produce a new critical edition, and I have generallyfollowed the text of Marcovich where he diverges from Diels. But insome nine cases my text differs from both Diels and Marcovich insuch a way that the interpretation of the fragment is altered, some-times radically (see p. 26). The notes to the translation are designedto provide the minimum of information required to understandHeraclitus' words without a knowledge of Greek. The commentary isthere for those readers who would go further. But in the commentarytoo all Greek words have been given in transliteration, and the elementof scholarly controversy has been kept to a minimum (although Ihave tried to acknowledge my debt to my predecessors, and to take

x Prefacesome account of their views even where I disagree). The aim through-out has been not to add another book to the secondary literature onHeraclitus but to make the thought of Heraclitus accessible to thegeneral reader in the way that a good translation and commentary onthe Divine Comedy tries to make the poetry of Dante accessible toone who knows little or no Italian.

The comparison to Dante is chosen deliberately. Despite the vastdifference in scale between the two works, and despite the fact thatour text is only partially preserved, even from these shattered remainswe can see that the literary art of Heraclitus' composition was com-parable in technical cunning and density of content to that of Dante'smasterpiece. As a thinker, Heraclitus was even more original. And inboth cases the reader who approaches his author without any schol-arly assistance is likely to get quickly lost. May this serve as myexcuse for such a lengthy commentary to such a brief text.

The first draft was written in Athens in 197475, when I held asenior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanitiesand was in residence as visiting professor at the American School ofClassical Studies. I am happy to express my appreciation to theEndowment for its support, and to thank the American School, itsthen director James McCredie, and the staff of the Blegen Libraryfor their friendly help and hospitality. I am greatly obliged to theResearch Center for Greek Philosophy and the Academy of Athensfor cordial assistance, and in particular to Dr E.N. Roussos of thatCenter who permitted me to use his typescript of Wiese's dissertation,Heraklit bei Klemens von Alexandrien. Among the colleagues whoimproved this work by their criticism I must mention G.E.L. Owenand Edward Hussey. The translation has benefited from suggestionsby Diskin Clay, Jenny Strauss Clay, Martin Ostwald and John vanSickle. Barbara Hernnstein Smith kindly served as my Greeklessreader, and made many valuable suggestions for a more idiomatictranslation as well as for the presentation of notes and commentary.Finally, both the reader and I are indebted to R J . Mynott of theCambridge University Press for showing me how to condense thecommentary; it is not his fault if it is still a bit long.June 1977 Charles H. Kahn

A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdomis not a meditation upon death but upon life.

Spinoza, Ethics IV.67The longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality,the effort by which we strive to persevere in our own being,this is the emotional basis for all knowledge and the intimatepoint of departure for all human philosophy.

Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

Bibliography and abbreviations

Adkins, A.W.H. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values(Oxford, 1960)

AJP: American Journal of PhilologyAnaximander: C.H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek

Cosmology (New York, 1960)'A new look at Heraclitus': C.H. Kahn in American Philosophical

Quarterly 1 (1964), 189-203Bollack, J. and H. Wismann. Heraclite ou la separation (Paris, 1972)Bronowski, J. The Ascent of Man (London, 1973)Burnet, J. Early Greek Philosophy (4th ed. London, 1930)Bywater, I. Heracliti Ephesii reliquiae (Oxford, 1877)Deichgraber, K. 'Bemerkungen zu Diogenes' Bericht iiber Heraklit',

Philologus 93 (1938), 12-30Diels, H. Doxographigraeci (Berlin, 1879; reprint, 1929)Diels, H. Herakleitos von Ephesos (1st ed. Berlin, 1901; 2nd ed.

1909)DK: H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. by W. Kranz

(Berlin, 1951)D.L.: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers (ed. H.S. Long,

Oxford, 1964)Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951)Frankel, H. Dichtung und Philosophie des fru'hen Griechentums (1st

ed. New York, 1951; 2nd ed. Munich, 1962)Frankel, H. Wege und Formen fruhgriechischen Denken (3rd ed.

Munich, 1968)Furley, D. and R.E. Allen (eds.). Studies in Presocratic Philosophy,

Vol. I (London, 1970)Gigon, O. Untersuchungen zu Heraklit (Basel dissertation, Leipzig,

1935)Gigon, O. Der Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie (Basel, 1945)Gomperz, H. 'Ueber die ursprungliche Reihenfolge einiger Bruchstiicke

Heraklits', Hermes 58 (1923), 20ff.

Bibliography and abbreviations xiii

Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. I (Cambridge,1962)

Holscher, U. Anfdngliches Fragen: Studien zur fruhen griechischenPhilosophie (Gottingen, 1968)

Hussey, E. The Presocratics (London, 1972)JHS: Journal of Hellenic StudiesKerschensteiner, J. Kosmos. Quellenkritische Untersuchungen zu den

Vorsokratikern (Munich, 1962)Kirk, G.S.Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge, 1954)Kirk and Raven: G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers

(Cambridge, 1957)Lebeck, A. The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure (Wash-

ington, 1971)LSJ: Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, 1925

40)Mansfeld, J. Die Offenbarung des Parmenides und die menschliche

Welt (Assen, 1964)Marcovich, M. Heraclitus, editio maior (Merida, Venezuela, 1967)Marcovich, PW: article 'Herakleitos' in PW Supplement-Band X

(1965), 246-320Mondolfo, R. and L. Taran. Eraclito. Testimonianze e Imitazioni

(Florence, 1972)North, H. Sophrosyne: Self-Know ledge and Self-Restraint in Greek

Literature (Cornell, 1966)'On early Greek astronomy': C.H. Kahn in JHS 90 (1970), 99-116Powell, J.E. A Lexicon to Herodotus (Cambridge, 1938; reprint,

Hildesheim, 1960)PW: Real Encyclopddie der classischen Alter-tumswissenschaft, ed.

Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll (Stuttgart, 1894- )Reinhardt, K. Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Phil-

osophie (Bonn, 1916; reprint, 1959)Reinhardt, K. Vermdchtnis der Antike. Gesammelte Essays zur Phil-

osophie und Geschichtsschreibung, ed. C. Becker (Gottingen, 1966)Schleiermacher, F. Herakleitos der dunkle, von Ephesos, in Sdmtliche

Werke Abt. Ill, Bd. 2 (Berlin, 1839), pp. 1-146Snell, B. Die Entdeckung des Geistes (3rd ed. Hamburg, 1955)Snell, B. 'Die Sprache Heraklits', Hermes 61 (1926), 353-81 ; in

Gesammelte Schriften (Gottingen, 1966)Stokes, M.C. One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy (Cambridge,

Mass., 1971)The Verb 'Be'in Ancient Greek: C.H. Kahn, The Verb 'Be'and its

xiv Bibliography and abbreviations

Synonyms, Part 6, ed. J.W.M. Verhaar (Foundations of LanguageSuppl. Series, Vol. 16, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1973)

Verdenius, W J . *A psychological statement of Heraclitus', Mnemosyne,Series 3.11 (1943), 115-21

Vlastos, G. 'On Heraclitus', AJP 76 (1955), 337-68, reprinted in partin Furley and Allen

von Arnim, H. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, 3 vols. (Leipzig,1903-5)

Walzer, R. Eraclito, Raccolta dei frammenti (Florence, 1939; reprint,1964)

West, M.L. Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford, 1971)Wiese, H. Heraklit bei Klemens von Alexandrien (Kiel dissertation,

1963, typescript)Zeller-Nestle: E. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschicht-

lichen Entwicklung, I, 6th ed. by W. Nestle (Leipzig, 1919-20)Zuntz, G. Persephone. Three Essays on Religion and Thought in

Magna Graecia (Oxford, 1971)

General introduction

1 The Man, the Time, and the PlaceThe details of Heraclitus' life are almost completely unknown. Reli-able information is limited to the fact that he was a native of Ephesus,on the coast of Asia Minor north of Miletus, and that his father'sname was Bloson. His approximate date is fixed by a synchronismwith the reign of Darius, 521 to 487 B.C.; his traditional 'acme' inthe 69th Olympiad, 504501 B.C., is probably nothing more than asimplified version of the same synchronism.1 The rough accuracy ofthis date, on the threshold of the fifth century, is guaranteed by frag-ment XVIII (D. 40), where Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hecataeusare cited as older contemporaries or figures of the recent past. Allthree men seem to have died between 510 and 480 B.C.2 The bookdates itself, then, in or near this period. The same approximate datecould be inferred from the presence or absence of various philosophi-cal influences: there are clear debts to the sixth-century Milesians, toPythagoras and Xenophanes, but none to Parmenides or to anythinker of the fifth century.

The 'life' of Heraclitus by Diogenes Laertius is a tissue of Hellen-istic anecdotes, most of them obviously fabricated on the basis ofstatements in the preserved fragments. (The unusually disgustingreports of his final illness and death reveal a malicious pleasure inmocking a figure whom the Stoics venerated as the source of theirown philosophy.) Suggestive, if not entirely credible, are the storieswhich describe Heraclitus as refusing to engage in politics or to legis-late for Ephesus, in sharp contrast with the public activities of mostearly philosophers. Such stories may reflect no more than theexpressions of contempt for his fellow-citizens found, for example,in LXIV (D. 121). A related anecdote, probably more worthy ofbelief, tells us that he relinquished the hereditary and largely honor-ific title of 'king' to his younger brother.3 If true, this would implythat Heraclitus was the eldest son of one of the most aristocratic

2 General introduction

families in Ionia, the Androclids, who traced their descent back toAndroclus, son of King Codrus of Athens, reputed leader of theIonian migration to Asia Minor and founder of Ephesus.

Heraclitus is said to have deposited his book as a dedication in thegreat temple of Artemis, where the general public would not haveaccess to it.4 The dimensions of this archaic Artemesium, built notlong before Heraclitus' birth, are still recognizable in the picturesqueremains of a later rebuilding: the sheer scale of the enterprise is evi-dence for the wealth, the power, and the civic pride of Ephesus inthe middle of the sixth century.5 The temple was constructed about560 B.C. 'in emulation of the temple of Hera which had just beenbuilt on Samos, but larger indeed one of the largest ever to beattempted by a Greek architect'.6 This architectural rivalry betweenthe new Ephesian temple and its slightly older neighbor, the Heraionof Samos, prefigures a generation in advance the philosophic emu-lation that will oppose Heraclitus to his famous Samian predecessor,Pythagoras. (Compare XVIII, D. 40 and XXV-XXVI, D. 129 and 81.)

Like other Ionian cities of Asia Minor, the destiny of Ephesus inthe sixth century was linked to the rise of Lydia as dominant powerunder Croesus, and to the latter's overthrow by Cyrus the Persian in547 or 546 B.C. Ephesus seems to have remained on good terms withthe ruling powers in the east. Croesus of Lydia contributed to theconstruction of the Artemesium. And when her great neighborMiletus was destroyed by the Persians after the disastrous Ionianrevolt of 494, Ephesus was spared. In the earlier period Miletus hadsurpassed all other Ionian cities in maritime enterprise and colonialexpansion, while serving at the same time as the birthplace for west-ern science and philosophy: it was in sixth-century Miletus thatThales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes created the tradition ofnatural philosophy. The destruction of Miletus at the beginning ofthe fifth century left Ephesus as the major Greek city of Asia Minor,a position she retained until the end of antiquity, as we can see todayfrom the resurrected splendor of her Roman ruins.

It was in this opulent city, in the days of rivalry between Ephesus,Samos, and Miletus, under Persian control but before the unsuccess-ful Ionian revolt, that Heraclitus grew up as the eldest son of thenoblest family in the city. (The presence of the Persians in and aroundEphesus may be reflected in a scornful reference to magoi in D. 14.See below on CXV.) We have no information on the struggles betweenthe poor and the rich, the pro-Persian and the anti-Persian partiesthat must have dominated the civic life of Ephesus at this time.

The book 3Heraclitus' attack upon his fellow-citizens for the expulsion ofHermodorus (in LXIX, D. 12) certainly presupposes local autonomyand probably also some form of popular government. Heraclitus willhimself have had small sympathy for democracy understood in theGreek sense as rule by the greater number, or by the lower classes, aswe see from his contemptuous reference to the demos or 'mob' inLIX (D. 104). On the other hand, there is no reason to think of himas an unconditional partisan of the rich.7 The fragments and the lateranecdotes agree in portraying him as an observer audessus de lamelee, withdrawn from competing factions. I imagine his civic atti-tude by analogy with the quasi-neutral stance of Solon, but withoutany of the active political involvement of the latter. Solon saw him-self as a mediating force, opposing the excesses of the rival parties,'standing like a boundary mark between the warring factions' (fr.25) in order to preserve the common interests of the city as a whole.So Heraclitus, who discovered in what is shared or common to all {toxynon) the essential principle of order in the universe, recognizedwithin the city the unifying role of the nomos, the structure of civiclaw and moral custom which protects the demos as the city wall pro-tects all the inhabitants of the city (LXV, D. 44). The only politicalattitude which we can safely extrapolate from the fragments is alucid, almost Hobbesian appreciation of the fact that civilized lifeand communal survival depend upon loyalty to the nomos, the lawin which all citizens have a share (XXX, D. 114), but which may berealized in the leadership of a single outstanding man.8

2 The Book

Heraclitus is, as Diels put it, 'the most subjective and, in a sense, themost modern prose author of antiquity'.9 A loner among a gregariousrace, he seems to have had no personal disciples or associates. (Oneanecdote has him fleeing human society in disgust and going to livelike a hermit in the mountains.) In a literary age which we think of asstill primarily 'oral', Heraclitus' influence made itself felt exclusivelythrough the power of his written word. Within a generation or two'his book acquired such fame that it produced partisans of his doc-trine who were called Heracliteans'.10 The best known of fifth-century Heracliteans is Cratylus of Athens, a rather taciturn partici-pant in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name, whose eccentricideas are reported more fully by Aristotle (Metaphysics lOlOall).Aristotle strangely names Cratylus as one of Plato's teachers (ibid.

4 General introduction987a32), perhaps because he regarded him as a source of theHeraclitean influence which he rightly recognized in Plato's ownthought. The stylistic impact of Heraclitus' book is well documentedin fifth-century literature, notably in the fragments of Democritus,several of which seem to be composed as a direct response to state-ments by Heraclitus.11 The Hippocratic treatise On Regimen, prob-ably from the same period, shows a more systematic attempt toimitate the enigmatic, antithetical style of Heraclitus' prose.12 Thereis enough evidence for widespread interest in Heraclitus among theintellectuals who represent what is called the Enlightenment of thelate fifth century B.C. to establish the plausibility, if not the literaltruth, of the story that it was the tragedian Euripides himself whogave the book to Socrates and asked for his opinion of it.13

It is in the fourth-century works of Plato and Aristotle that wefind the first detailed discussion of Heraclitean doctrine, but fewliteral quotations from his book. The doctrine itself is seen from aperspective far removed from the intellectual atmosphere of the earlyfifth century. For Plato Heraclitus is the theorist of universal flux(panta rhei 'all things flow') in contrast to Parmenides, the partisanof a fixed and stable reality. For Aristotle Heraclitus was a materialmonist who derived the entire physical world from fire as its under-lying element. Both characterizations cast a long shadow over laterreadings of Heraclitus' text. Before turning to the book itself, I willbriefly survey its influence over the next few centuries and indicatethe principal sources from which our knowledge of it is derived. Likeall Greek prose authors before Herodotus and all philosophicalwritings before Plato, the original text of Heraclitus is lost. We areentirely dependent upon quotations, paraphrases, and reports in laterliterature that happens to have survived the collapse of ancient civi-lization and the destruction of its papyrus libraries.

A full account of Heraclitus' doctrine as he understood it, alongthe lines traced by Aristotle, was given by the latter's pupil Theo-phrastus in his great doxographical survey, The Opinions of theNatural Philosophers (Physikon Doxai). Theophrastus' own work islost, but a good excerpt from the relevant sections, including closeparaphrases of several extant fragments, is preserved in DiogenesLaertius' Life of Heraclitus, IX.711 (translated below in AppendixIIA). The high point of Heraclitus' philosophical influence wasreached a generation later in the work of Zeno, the founder of theStoic school in the early third century B.C., and in that of Zeno'ssuccessor Cleanthes. Cleanthes wrote a commentary on Heraclitus in

The book 5

four books, of which no certain trace has been preserved; but thesurviving sections of his famous Hymn to Zeus contain elaborateechoes of Heraclitean phrasing and imagery.14 The Stoics sawHeraclitus through the deforming lens of their own system, but thatsystem was itself based upon a deep study of his written words. Ibelieve the Stoic interpretation is, in its broad outlines, more faithfulto Heraclitus' own thought than is generally recognized. In their dog-matic way, and without his subtlety of thought and expression, theStoics are the true Heracliteans of antiquity.

Interest in Heraclitus remained intense throughout the Hellenisticperiod, partly but not exclusively as a result of Stoic influence.Diogenes (IX. 15) lists seven other authors who wrote commentarieson the book.15 By the fourth century B.C. Heraclitus had acquiredthe status of a literary classic, a status which he kept as long as ancientcivilization endured.

The various full-length commentaries are lost, and the earliestextant author to quote extensively from Heraclitus is Plutarch, thePlatonic philosopher and biographer of the late first century A.D.The work was still familiar in the next century, as we can see frommany quotations and from the witty parody by Lucian in his Sale ofPhilosophic Lives, which reflects and presupposes on the reader'spart an accurate knowledge of the text.16 The most abundant andmost faithful quotations are found in the works of two Christianbishops writing about A.D. 200: Clement of Alexandria and Hippo-lytus of Rome. Several good verbatim citations are preserved byanother early Church father, Origen of Alexandria. Plotinus in thethird century A.D. and other later Neoplatonists also quote fromHeraclitus, but they are not much concerned with literal citation.Our last important source of original fragments is the anthology ofwise sayings on moral topics put together by John Stobaeus in thefifth century A.D., almost a millenium after the original compositionof the book.

Stobaeus is probably drawing upon earlier anthologies; and otherlate authors may have got their quotations at second hand. (Origentells us he is citing Heraclitus from the pagan philosopher Celsus; andPorphyry once quotes the text from a neo-Pythagorean namedNumenius.) But I see no reason to doubt that down to the time ofPlutarch and Clement, if not later, the little book of Heraclitus wasavailable in its original form to any reader who chose to seek it out.Some authors obviously made selections of quotations for particularpurposes, like the excerpts in Hippolytus (who wants to show that

6 General introductionHeraclitus is the source of a Christian heresy) and in Sextus Empiricus,who presents Heraclitus as a Stoic rationalist in epistemology. Theselection of quotations in Diogenes' Life of Heraclitus (IX. 12) ismotivated by the special interest in illustrating the philosopher's per-sonality. The existence of such excerpts has led some modern scholarsto suppose that the work circulated in Stoic or Hellenistic 'editions'.But it is one thing to cite a few passages for some special purpose,and another thing to edit or rearrange the text as a whole. For thelatter there is really no evidence. The book itself must have been soshort that the project of an abridged edition would have had nopoint.17 Plutarcfi and Clement both know Heraclitus by heart, andfrequently quote him from memory. It seems obvious that these twoextraordinarily learned and literary authors each possessed his owncopy of the book. The same may be true for others who quote frommemory, as Marcus Aurelius does in the second century A.D. andPlotinus a century later.

Is it possible to form some general idea of a work that was so con-tinuously read, quoted, imitated, and interpreted for more than sevencenturies, and from which we have nearly a hundred literal citations?Early editors, such as Bywater, tried to group the fragments by sub-ject matter.18 After 1901, however, the standard arrangement becamethat of Diels, who lists the fragments in alphabetical order accordingto the name of the author citing them. This apparently irrational pro-cedure can be justified on sound philological grounds. Recognizingthat any arrangement by subject matter was to some extent arbitrary,Diels wished above all to avoid imposing any personal interpretationupon his edition of the texts. In fact, by the atomistic character ofhis arrangement he has largely succeeded in imposing his own view ofHeraclitus' work as lacking in literary structure. For Diels was moti-vated not only by the impossibility of reconstructing the originalsequence of the fragments. He also called attention to their aphoristicstyle, their resemblance to the sayings of the Seven Sages, and (withNietzsche's Zarathustra in mind) he suggested that these sentenceshad originally been set down in a kind of notebook or philosophicaljournal, with no literary form or unity linking them to one another.He thus implied, after all, that the chaotic pattern of his arrangementgave a true picture of Heraclitus' own composition. In the case ofHeraclitus, arrangement and interpretation are inseparable from oneanother, as Diels saw in the work of his predecessors. His mistakewas to imagine that his own order could be an exception.

The arrangement of the fragments presented here is based upon a

The book 7

different assumption: that Heraclitus' discourse as a whole was ascarefully and artistically composed as are the preserved parts, andthat the formal ordering of the whole was as much an element in itstotal meaning as in the case of any lyric poem from the same period.The true parallel for an understanding of Heraclitus' style is, I suggest,not Nietzsche but his own contemporaries, Pindar and Aeschylus.The extant fragments reveal a command of word order, imagery, andstudied ambiguity as effective as that to be found in any work ofthese two poets. I think we can best imagine the structure ofHeraclitus' work on the analogy of the great choral odes, with theirfluid but carefully articulated movement from image to aphorism,from myth to riddle to contemporary allusion. Yet the intellectualunity of Heraclitus' composition was in a sense greater than that ofany archaic poem, since its final intent was more explicitly didactic,and its central theme a direct affirmation of unity: hen panta einai,'all things are one'. The content of this perfectly general formulaseems to have been filled in by a chain of statements linked togethernot by logical argument but by interlocking ideas, imagery, andverbal echoes. Theophrastus found the result 'incomplete and incon-sistent', but he was looking for a prosaic exposition of physicaltheories.19 Heraclitus is not merely a philosopher but a poet, and onewho chose to speak in tones of prophecy. The literary effect heaimed at may be compared to that of Aeschylus' Oresteia: the solemnand dramatic unfolding of a great truth, step by step, where the senseof what has gone before is continually enriched by its echo in whatfollows.20

That Heraclitus' discourse possessed an artistic design of this typecan scarcely be demonstrated, but is strongly suggested by clear evi-dence of artistry in every fragment where the original wording hasbeen preserved. The impression that the original work was a kind ofcommonplace book, in which sentences or paragraphs were jotteddown as they occurred to the author, is largely due to the fact thatHeraclitus makes use of the proverbial style of the Sages, just as heinvokes the enigmatic tones of the Delphic oracle. But Heraclitus hasmany literary strings to his bow; he does not always speak in riddlesor aphorisms. Among the quotations are four or five long passages ofseveral connected sentences. Fragment I is a carefully wrought proem,which suggests the beginning of a well planned book.21 XXX (D.114) exhibits a complex literary structure elaborated by word play,phonetic resonance, and syntactical ambiguity. And other longquotations show that Heraclitus' prose could be supple and ironic as

8 General introduction

well as massive and stately. XXII (D. 56) reports a traditional storyin a narrative style that suggests the naive manner of a folk tale.CXVII (D. 5) is unique in its unrestrained sarcasm on the subject ofblood purification and praying to man-made gods. The nearest paral-lel to such plainness of speech is in LXIV (D. 121), where the out-burst on the men of Ephesus who deserve hanging utilizes, but doesnot exemplify, the proverbial style of wisdom literature.

This diversity of artistic technique does not prove that the work asa whole was carefully composed. It does indicate that Heraclitus wasmaster of his medium and could impose an artistic shape upon it ifhe chose. And there is a general consideration that tells strongly infavor of his having done so. If we survey the plastic and literary artsof archaic Greece, we are struck in almost every case by the remark-able sense of form that characterizes the individual work. Since thepre-classical notion of poetic structure does not coincide with thelogical or psychological pattern of beginning, middle and end that istypical of later Greek literature, scholars have not always recognizedthis older style of literary form, just as they once failed to appreciatethe peculiar dynamism of archaic sculpture. But today this notion ofarchaic form has become familiar to us again, in part from its redis-covery by artists working in our own century. Whether we are con-sidering an ode of Pindar, a narrative in Herodotus, or a sculpturedfrieze, it would be difficult to find an art work from archaic Greecethat is finely wrought in detail but unshapely as a whole.

The preceding argument tends to show that the fragments wereoriginally arranged in a significant order. It does not claim to showthat the original order has been recovered here. The present arrange-ment is largely my own contrivance, the result of much trial anderror, and it has no special title to historical authenticity. I haveworked on the assumption that, if Heraclitus' own order was a mean-ingful one, it is the interpreter's task to present these incomplete andshattered fragments in the most meaningful order he can find. Howclose I have come to duplicating Heraclitus' own order may dependin part upon how successful I have been in grasping his meaning.22

There are, however, a few formal points of reference on which Ihave relied. The existence of an introduction is guaranteed by frag-ment I, which suggests that Heraclitus' initial emphasis was uponmen's failure to grasp the universal logos which he proclaims. Accord-ingly, I have grouped the fragments of a critical and polemical natureat the beginning. Following a hint of Reinhardt, I take XXXVI (D.50) as the transition from this introduction to the exposition

The doctrine 9

proper.23 For the structure of the exposition itself, there is onemuch-maligned piece of external evidence: 'the book is divided intothree discourses (logoi), on the universe, on politics [and ethics], andon theology'.24 I have followed this clue by presenting the moreexplicitly cosmological statements immediately after the introduc-tory polemic, and reserving for the end those fragments which referto cult and deity. Since in my view Heraclitus' psychology is insep-arable from his theology, I have put most of the fragments dealingwith the psyche immediately before the last section on the gods.

3 The Doctrine: Heraclitus and his PredecessorsFrom the time of Cratylus and Plato with their special interest in thedoctrine of flux, down to the Christian Church fathers who werefascinated by a logos that they could so easily assimilate to the wordthat was 'in the beginning with God', every generation and everyschool construed the doctrine of Heraclitus from its own particularvantage point. We will return to the deeper problems of hermen-eutical perspective in the introduction to the commentary, 'Onreading Heraclitus'. Here I want only to provide a modest historicalcorrective: a survey of the early Greek tradition that can help us tosee the thought of Heraclitus against the intellectual background ofhis own time and place.

As a first approximation, I distinguish two traditions in the intel-lectual heritage of Heraclitus, that is, in the body of thought he isresponding to and which he is, by this very response, in the act oftransforming. On the one hand there is the popular tradition of wis-dom represented by the poets and by the sages of the early sixthcentury, including Solon and Bias. Note that Solon was both a poetand a sage, and that the term sophos, which means 'wise (man)',originally referred to skill in any art, and particularly in the art ofpoetry. On the other hand, there is the new technical or scientificculture which took shape in Miletus in this same century. Undercircumstances which we can only dimly perceive, natural philosophybegan as the work of a handful of men, the circle around Thales andAnaximander. (The origin of the new tradition as an offshoot fromthe older one, as well as the failure of the ancients to distinguishbetween the two, is symbolized by the figure of Thales, who is regu-larly counted among the Seven Sages but also named as the firstnatural philosopher.) By the time of Heraclitus at the end of the sixthcentury, the scientific tradition had begun to spread from Miletus to

10 General introduction

other neighboring cities (Samos, Colophon, Clazomenae, Ephesus)and had also been carried to the distant west by Ionian refugees. Thussometime in the last half of that century Pythagoras migrated fromSamos to Croton and Metapontum on the southern shores of Italy;perhaps a bit later, Xenophanes travelled from Colophon to Sicilyand to Elea on the west coast of Italy, below Paestum and Naples.In the fifth century this philosophical culture will be brought toAthens by such men as Anaxagoras (from the Ionian city of Clazo-menae) and the Sophists (including Gorgias, from Sicily). The con-sequent generalization and popularization of these new ideas, aboveall in Athens in the so-called Enlightenment of the late fifth century,is reflected for us in the extant works of Euripides, Aristophanes,and Thucydides, and in the earliest Hippocratic treatises. It is carriedon by the orators, philosophers and scientists of the fourth century.Through the work and influence of Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle,and mathematician-astronomers like Eudoxus of Cnidos, this newscientific and philosophic culture became the intellectual heritage ofthe whole civilized west.

It is necessary to bear in mind the fact that this scientific culture,which every educated person today can take for granted no matterhow little he knows of its technical detail, was something quite newin Heraclitus' day and still restricted to a small circle of initiates. Forthe most part, the overwhelmingly dominant culture was what I shallcall the popular tradition: the culture of Homer, the poets, and theearly sages.

Neither the popular nor the scientific tradition is internally simpleor uniform, and the radical difference between the two is muchclearer to us than it was to Heraclitus himself.25 But the originalityof Heraclitus can be fully appreciated only in the light of this dis-tinction. For both his historical position and his role as a sage for thecenturies are most clearly seen as a bridge between these two tra-ditions.

The underlying assumption common to both traditions (and to allGreek thought) is a basic antithesis between gods and men, betweenthe divine and the human, and an interpretation of the human con-dition in the light of this contrast. Human nature for the Greeks isthus essentially characterized by mortality and fallibility: by thebrevity of human life and by the weakness of our intellectual vision.(Heraclitus is expressing this basic assumption when he says 'humannature has no insights, but the divine has them', LV, D. 78.) Where

The doctrine 11

the two traditions diverge most sharply is in their conception of whatis divine. For the poets of the popular tradition the gods have humanform, even though they are vastly superior in strength, clairvoyance,ability of all sorts, and in their total freedom from the shadow ofdeath. The clearest symptom (though not the original source) of thenew world view is a radical break with this anthropomorphism. WhenXenophanes complained that 'Homer and Hesiod ascribed to thegods everything that is a shame and reproach among men' (fr. 11), heis not departing in principle from the popular view. For it was part ofthis tradition that 'bards tell many a lie', and that every poet has theright to correct his predecessors by rejecting or reshaping a familiarstory.26 The new tendency to require that tales about the gods con-form with human moral standards can be seen as completing ratherthan denying the traditional conception of the gods as superior, butgenerally similar, to human beings. And the origins of this moralizingtendency in Greek theology can be traced back at least as far as theOdyssey, which opens with a scene in which Zeus complains thatmortals always blame the gods for disaster when they are themselvesat fault. The whole structure of the Odyssey implies the thesis uponwhich Hesiod insists with such vehemence: that the actions of Zeuswill respect and enforce recognizable principles of justice.27

But it is something else again when Xenophanes attacks the viewsof mortals who 'imagine that the gods are born, and that they havethe same clothes and voice and body as men do' (fr. 14; cf. frs. 1516), and when he announces instead that there is 'one god, greatestamong gods and men, similar to mortals neither in body nor inthought' (fr. 23), who remains forever stationary in one place but'agitates all things with the effortless thought of his mind' (frs. 256). What we encounter here, for the first time in surviving literature,is a total rejection of the basis upon which the traditional theologyrests. For within this tradition divine genealogies and family connec-tions, as well as direct personal intervention in the affairs of mankind,were fundamental features of the popular and poetic conception ofthe gods.

This new conception of divinity as birthless and not merely death-less, as radically different from men in every respect, is essentiallythe conception of a cosmic god: a deity conceived not as the supremepatriarch of a quasi-human family but as the ruling principle of anorderly universe. And such a view presupposes the work of thescientists or natural philosophers whom Aristotle called the physikoi,

12 General introduction

students of the nature of things (physis). More specifically, thetheology of Xenophanes presupposes the cosmology of the firstphysikoi, the Milesians of the sixth century.2 8

(a) The popular traditionBefore turning to the new tradition I want to summarize the moralconceptions of the popular view, as presented in the early poets. Thediscussion will be limited to the notion of arete or human excellence,generally translated 'virtue', and to some discrepancies between dif-ferent notions of excellence attested in the early literature.

The Homeric conception of arete is strikingly expressed in a fewfamiliar verses. Aien aristeuein kai hypeirochon emmenai allon is theadvice which a heroic father gives to his son (Iliad VI.208), as Peleusto Achilles (XI.784): 'Always be first and best, and ahead of every-one else.' This unabashed striving for individual pre-eminence, in thespirit of an athletic competition or a contemporary race for theAmerican presidency, is specified for the Homeric hero by two rangesof activity in which he may achieve distinction: 'to be a speaker ofwords and a doer of deeds' {Iliad IX.443). The deeds are those ofmilitary and athletic prowess; the words are those of wise counseland planning. This ancient duality of speech and action remains as apermanent paradigm for the classification of achievements: it is echoedin Heraclitus' opening reference to the 'words and works (erga) whichI set forth' (in fragment I), as in the later Sophistic antithesis between'in word' (logos) and 'in deed' (ergon). It is natural to take the heroesof the two Homeric epics as supreme examples of success in thesetwo fields: Achilles as the greatest warrior at Troy, and Odysseus asthe wiliest and most sagacious of mortal men. For a good 'speaker ofwords' is of course a man of discretion and foresight: language standshere for intelligence. We may speak of a contrast between the activeand the calculating or the military and the intellectual virtues, as longas we realize that the intelligence which is prized is the practical useof words and wits to guide successful action.

Thus we find in the early heroic code, whose grip on classical andeven on modern Greece is extraordinarily persistent, no recognitionof intellectual or moral excellence that might be distinct in principlefrom the successful pursuit of whatever goals one has in view. Withsome oversimplification, we can say that according to the heroic codean action is judged wrong, shameful or foolish only if and because itwill lead to failure or disaster for the agent himself.

This statement is oversimplified in two respects. In the first place,

The doctrine 13

the success or failure of the agent is generally inseparable from thefortunes of his family, his friends, and other close associates. To thisextent heroic individualism falls considerably short of egoism strictlyunderstood.29 Secondly, and more significantly, the heroic code alsorecognizes independent standards of unseemly behavior and unjustdealing, behavior for which one may rightly be punished or at leastdespised. Thus the beating of Thersites in the Iliad, the killing of thesuitors in the Odyssey are both presented as justified punishment forthe violation of a code whose rules cannot be defined exclusively interms of success and failure in the heroic competition for arete.Recent discussions of the early Greek moral tradition have recognizedthis distinction between the 'competitive' excellences and other more'quiet' or 'cooperative' virtues, to use Adkins' terminology, and havestressed the extent to which the heroic conception of arete favors theformer over the latter.30 The contrast is real, but shifting and com-plex; and it cannot be fully captured by any single pair of antitheticalterms. In some cases it seems more accurate to speak of a tensionbetween individualistic and social virtues; in other cases the oppo-sition is rather between the virtues of achievement and those ofrestraint.

It is the last pair of terms that best characterizes the disparitybetween the heroic conception of excellence and a quite differentmoral ideal enshrined in the sayings of the Seven Sages and associatedin classical literature with the term sophrosyne.^1 In epic poetrysophrosyne (in its old form saophrosyne) has the literal meaning of'good sense' or 'soundness of mind', the opposite of folly; it implieslittle more than the ability to take rational action in pursuit of one'sown interest. In later usage, however, the same term comes to denotea certain restrained mode of speech and action that is sociallyesteemed, modest behavior that is likely to meet with approval fromone's fellow men and also from the gods.32 It is this general prefer-ence for moderation and restraint which must account for the curiousfact that a word meaning 'good sense' comes to designate somethinglike 'temperance'. Chastity in sexual matters, moderation in eatingand drinking, are then seen as concrete manifestations of sophrosyne:a decent sense of one's place within the social setting and one'slimitations as a human being. So sophrosyne comes to be the watch-word for the very un-Homeric conception of excellence summed upin the aphorisms of the Seven Sages: 'Know thyself, 'Nothing inexcess', 'Measure is best'.33

Since the heroic ideal of 'always be first and best' is clearly pre-

14 General introduction

dominant in the Homeric epics (composed around 700 B.C.), whilethe ideology of self-restraint tends to prevail in later literature begin-ning with Hesiod and gets canonized in the wisdom of the sixth-century sages, there has been much speculation about the nature andthe causes of this moral 'development'.34 My own view is that thischronological shift from one ideal to the other is more literary thansociological. The Homeric poems do not portray a real society,neither that of the poets nor that of any other definite historicalperiod. They present us with a highly stylized picture in which cul-tural traits from many periods are combined in an essentially fictiveworld, created over the centuries by the tradition of epic poetry andorganized according to principles that are proper to the heroic poemas such, an art form designed to create and preserve a tradition ofindividual glory. Hence the code of individual achievement and unin-hibited self-assertion is much stronger in the epic world than it canever have been in any real society.35

For our purposes, however, it does not matter how far the contrastbetween the ideal of self-assertion and the morality of self-restraint isthe result of an ideological shift between two stages in the develop-ment of Greek society. The important fact is that both views, theselfish and the social conception of arete, and the deep tensionbetween the two, were there in the moral bloodstream of the Greekslong before philosophy appeared on the scene. This discrepancybetween two views of excellence must be taken into account notonly in reading Greek tragedy and Greek moral philosophy but alsoin attempting to understand the political careers of men like Themi-stocles and Alcibiades. Most pertinently, it is in the light of thisideological tension that we must interpret those utterances ofHeraclitus that refer to excellence and self-knowledge, to the bestmen and the vile, and to sophronein or 'thinking well'.

Here as elsewhere we find that the characteristic achievement ofHeraclitus lies in articulating a view within which the opposites canbe seen together as a unity. For Heraclitus there will be no conflictbetween the selfish and the social conception of arete, since thedeepest structure of the self will be recognized as co-extensive withthe universe in general and the political community in particular.Men may live as if they had a private world of thinking and planning,but the logos of the world order, like the law of the city, is commonto all (III, D. 2 with XXX, D. 114). So true self-knowledge willcoincide with knowledge of the cosmic order, and true self-assertion

The doctrine 15

will mean holding fast to what is shared by all. The best of men,including those who die in battle in defense of their city, choose ever-lasting glory as did the Homeric hero. But what they choose is nottheir own interest in any private sense but what is common andshared (to xynon), that 'one thing in exchange for all' which rep-resents the divine unity of the cosmos (XCVII, D. 29 with C, D. 24).

A later generation enlightened by the Sophists will oppose physisto nomos, nature to convention. And the freethinkers of the latefifth century will challenge all moral claims and restrictions that restupon nomos alone. A precursor of the Enlightenment in otherrespects, Heraclitus is in this regard a conservative. For him there isno split in principle between nomos and nature. As an institution,law is neither man-made nor conventional: it is the expression insocial terms of the cosmic order for which another name is Justice(Dike). Heraclitus' political doctrine can be seen as a development ofHesiod's old insight, that the order allotted by Zeus to mankind is tofollow justice and shun violence: 'for to fish and beasts and wingedbirds he gave the rule (nomos) that they eat one another, since thereis no justice among them; but to human beings he gave justice (dike)9(Works and Days 275ff.).

I note that Heraclitus' restatement of this traditional view marksthe birth of political philosophy proper and the beginnings of thetheory of natural law, which will receive its classic statement by theStoics working under his inspiration. Heraclitus' own formulation isnovel in three respects. He generalizes the notion of Justice to applyto every manifestation of cosmic order, including the rule of thejungle by which birds and beasts eat one another (LXXXII, D. 80).Secondly, human law is conceived as the unifying principle of thepolitical community, and thus as grounded in the rational order ofnature which unifies the cosmos. Finally, the unique status of humannomos and the political order is interpreted as a consequence of thecommon human possession of speech (logos) and understanding(noos), that is, as a consequence of the rational capacity to communi-cate one's thoughts and come to an agreement (homologein inXXXVI, D. 50, echoing xyn legontas in XXX, D. 114). Thus it is thevery thought and word play of Heraclitus that Plato will echo when,in defending the natural basis of the moral order against the relativistsand nihilists of his own time, he defines law (nomos) as the arrange-ment disposed by reason (nous).^6 Heraclitus, like Plato, had seen hiscity conquered in war and torn by civil strife. He was all the more

16 General introduction

sensitive to the fundamental requirement, for a minimally decent life,of a human community upon whose legal and moral structure all thecitizens can rely.

(b) The tradition of natural philosophyThis synthesis between the selfish and social ideals of the Greek tra-dition was made possible by a deeper sense of unity articulated inHeraclitus' interpretation of the Milesian cosmology. Despite a widerange of mythic and poetic antecedents, the Ionian conception of theworld as a kosmos was something new, and its novelty is identicalwith the emergence of western science and philosophy as such. Whatwe find in sixth-century Miletus is a scientific revolution in Kuhn'ssense, the creation of a new paradigm of theoretical explanation, withthe peculiar distinction that this world view is the first one to berecognizably scientific, so that the innovation in this case is not somuch a revolution within science as a revolution into science for thefirst time. The Milesian cosmologies are scientific, in the sense inwhich for example the world picture of Hesiod is not, because thenew view of the kosmos is connected both with a geometric modeland with empirical observation in such a way that the model can beprogressively refined and corrected to provide a better explanationfor a wider range of empirical data.

Astronomical observation, like numerical calculation, had longbeen practiced with great skill in the East; and for several centuriesafter Thales and Anaximander the Greeks remained the pupils of theBabylonians in this respect. But Anaximander provided what it seemsthat no Babylonian and no Greek had ever conceived before him: asimple geometrical model by which to comprehend the observedmovements of the heavenly bodies. In its general outlines, with theearth situated in the middle of a system of concentric circles, theMilesian scheme remained the standard one in scientific astronomydown to Copernicus. But in all its details it was subject to systematicand in some cases very rapid improvement. The conception of thefixed stars as revolving in a stellar sphere, if it does not go back toAnaximander or Anaximenes, must have been articulated soon after-wards. The shape of the earth, a flat disk for Anaximander, was soonrecognized as spherical. The explanation of solar and lunar eclipse,which Anaximander seems to have provided for by an ad hoc hypoth-esis of fire-holes opening and closing, begins to take on a more accu-rate optical and geometric form by the time of Parmenides. The trueexplanation, according to essentially correct principles of celestial

The doctrine 17

geometry, was given by Anaxagoras within a century after Anaxi-mander's initial formulation of the model. The Greeks learned howto compute eclipses from the Babylonians; but they were the first toexplain them. And the very possibility of such an explanation wascreated by the idea of a clear geometric model for the heavens.

It is this celestial geometry that constitutes the radically new andrevolutionary aspect of the Milesian cosmology, considered as a con-tribution to science in the strict sense. And it is revealing forHeraclitus' relationship to the new science that it is precisely thisaspect of Milesian cosmology that interested him least. What little weknow about his pronouncements on astronomical matters suggests analmost deliberate preference for more primitive conceptions: for theview that the sun is the size of a human foot, that it is extinguishedevery night and relit every morning.37 What fascinated him in thenew world view was not its geometrical clarity and the possibilitiesthis offered for the development of exact science, but something else,something more directly continuous with older, pre-scientific con-cerns.

The early natural philosophers were not mere theoreticians; theywere practical astronomers, interested in forecasting seasonal changesof weather, measuring the agricultural seasons, and establishing areliable calendar.38 The Babylonians had used the gnomon or sundialfor this purpose, and the Greek tradition has it that the Ionians (morespecifically Anaximander according to some reports) had taken overthe instrument from them and began to make accurate measurementsof the astronomical seasons, as marked by solstice and equinox.39The result was a progressively more accurate scientific calendar, basedupon a convergence of lunar and solar cycles estimated first at 8 andthen at 19 years. The cycles themselves were probably discovered inMesopotamia. But their use in Greece (where the highly accurate'Metonic' cycle of 19 years was known about 450 B.C.) testifies to anincreasingly sophisticated tradition of observational astronomy.

The astronomical study of daily, monthly, and annual cycles isconnected not only with agricultural applications but also with theseafaring enterprises in which Miletus excelled: thus Thales wascredited with one of the earliest handbooks (in verse) of NauticalAstronomy.40 Both agricultural and navigational concerns requirecontinuous attention to the atmospheric phenomena of evaporationand precipitation involved in drought and rain, clouds and wind. It ischaracteristic of Ionian cosmology to connect these with other, lessimmediately obvious phenomena of earth, sea, and sky such as the

18 General introduction

silting process that has gradually transformed the ancient harbors ofEphesus and Miletus into marshy plains 3 and 5 miles from the sea,or the up-and-down changes in the level of the coastline that arefound throughout the Aegean area, as well as in southern Italy andto interpret them all in terms of a conflict between opposing powers:the wet and the dry, the hot and the cold, the bright and the dark.The natural philosophers construed this conflict as a cycle of elementalinterchange, within which each of the opposing powers dominates inturn, as the hot and dry does in summer, the cold and wet in winter.It was such a cycle that Anaximander described in the one survivingquotation from his book:

Out of those things [namely, the opposing powers] from whichtheir generation comes, into these again does the destruction ofthings take place, in accordance with what is right and necessary;for they make amends and pay the penalty to one another fortheir aggression (adikia, injustice) according to the ordinance ofTime. (DK 12.B1)

Here the pattern of physical change and transformation, the birth ofwhat is new and the death of what is old, is seen as a conflict regu-lated by an 'ordinance of time', where the contestants appear in turnas victor and vanquished. And this ordering is itself described in thelanguage of justice, where the wrongdoer must pay the penalty for hisaggression or excess. This Milesian notion of cosmic order as one ofopposition, reciprocity, and inevitable justice, is faithfully taken overby Heraclitus, with all its poetic resonance and association with older,mythical ideas: 'War is shared [for the killer will be killed in his turn],and [hence] Conflict is Justice.' (See LXXXII, D. 80, with commen-tary.)

I have so far characterized the new Ionian cosmology by threefundamental features: (1) a geometric model for the heavens, (2)observation and numerical measurement of astral cycles, and (3) theinterpretation of physical change as a conflict of elemental powerswithin a periodic order of reciprocity and symmetry recognized asjust. To these must be added a fourth, less original feature: the ten-dency to explain the present state of affairs by deriving it from someinitial situation or first beginning. In place of Hesiod's theogony, thenatural philosophers give us cosmogony. The reports on Anaximanderand the quotations from Anaxagoras show that Ionian cosmologybegan, like Hesiod and the book of Genesis, 'in the beginning'. Itdescribed the emergence of the world order as a gradual process ofgeneration or development from an arche, a starting point or 'what

The doctrine 19

came first of all' (Theogony 115). And there is some evidence tosuggest that Anaximander, like Empedocles and the atomists later,applied the principle of symmetry to foresee a reversal of the cosmicprocess, so that the earth which had emerged from the sea would sinkinto it again, and perhaps the whole world process might begin anew.41

These four principles characterize the original Greek conception ofthe natural world as a kosmos, an orderly arrangement whose struc-ture can be rationally understood. For the early cosmologists, as laterfor Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, this conception entailed a fifthprinciple to which I have alluded: the idea of the cosmos broughtwith it the idea of the cosmic god.42 Although this new theologicalview, with its radical departure from the traditional notion of thegods, is first clearly attested in the surviving fragments of Xenophanes,it seems likely that here too Anaximander was the precursor. For weare told that he described his primary cosmic principle, the apeironor Boundless, as eternal and unaging, which is to say divine. And hesaid of this divine principle that it 'circumscribes all things and steersthemair (DK12.A 15).

Now if Heraclitus shows little interest in the geometric model forthe heavens or the scientific explanation of nature in detail, histhought is nevertheless penetrated by the new conception of the cos-mos. Although not himself a physikos or natural philosopher proper,his own system can only be understood as a response to the worldview of the Milesian physicists. This will appear most clearly if wecompare his doctrine of Fire with the latest Milesian cosmology, thatof Anaximenes.

In place of the indeterminate Boundless of Anaximander, Anaxi-menes proposed the more definite physical form oiaer as startingpoint for the cosmic process. Before the word come to denoteatmospheric air, aer had meant 'mist' or Vapor'; and Anaximenesmust have chosen this principle because of its close association withthe atmospheric cycle of evaporation and condensation. He appearsto have taken that cycle as the paradigm for understanding physicalchange in general and explaining the origin of the world order: allthings are derived from aer by being condensed through cooling orby being rarefied through heating.43 This doctrine of Anaximenes,restated in later conceptual terms by Diogenes of Apollonia in thenext century, was taken by Aristotle as the pattern for the materialmonism which he ascribes to most of the early physikoi. Thus Thalesis said to have derived all things from water, as Anaximenes andDiogenes derived everything from air. And Heraclitus is named

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together with a certain Hippasus of Metapontum as having chosenfire as the starting point (Met. A 3, 983b984a). This interpretationof Heraclitus' doctrine by analogy with that of Anaximenes is morefully stated in the Theophrastean doxography in Simplicius:

They [sc. Hippasus and Heraclitus] produce all things from fire bythickening and rarefaction and they dissolve them back into fire,maintaining that this is the underlying nature or substrate of things.For Heraclitus says all things are an exchange (amoibe) for fire.(DK22.A5)

The last sentence of this report is a paraphrase of XL (D. 90): 'Allthings are requital (antamoibe) for fire, and fire for all things, asgoods for gold and gold for goods.' Thus Theophrastus, following theexample of Aristotle, understood Heraclitus' doctrine of fire as thestatement of a physical theory along the lines of Anaximenes andDiogenes of Apollonia, but differing from them by the substitutionof fire for air. And in doing so, Theophrastus was both right andwrong. For the assertion that all things are exchanged for fire musthave been intended as an allusion to Anaximenes' doctrine; just asstatements like 'for water it is death to become earth, but out ofearth water arises' (CII, D. 36), or the listing of sea, earth and light-ning storm as 'reversals' of fire (XXXVIII, D. 31 A) and the statementthat 'sea pours out, and it measures up to the same amount it wasbefore becoming earth' (XXXIX, D. 31B) can only be understood byreference to Ionian theories of elemental transformation.44 Suchtexts provided a prima facie case for grouping Heraclitus togetherwith the natural philosophers. Theophrastus' mistake (continued inthe tradition, both ancient and modern, that treats Heraclitus' doc-trine of fire as a physical theory of the same sort as Anaximenes')lies in ignoring the poetic and paradoxical nature of these statementsconcerning elemental change, and thus treating the mode ofexpression as irrelevant to the meaning. To make such a mistake is todisregard the hint that Heraclitus himself had given in speaking of theoracle which 'neither declares nor conceals but gives a sign' (XXXIII,D. 93). The sign, in Heraclitus' case, is the very form of his discourse,the nature of the logos which he has composed as an expression ofhis own view of wisdom, in contrast to that piling up of eruditionwhich he despises as poly mat hie, 'the learning of many things', in thework of his predecessors. It is precisely in the use of such words asantamoibe 'requital' and tropai 'turnings', 'reversals', as in the descrip-tion of elemental change as a cycle of 'birth' and 'death' with thesoul (psyche) placed both at the beginning and at the end of the cycle

The doctrine 21

(CII, D. 36), that Heraclitus gives the sign of his own deeper mean-ing. These signs, and the riddling nature of his whole discourse, weresystematically ignored by Theophrastus and the doxographers whofollowed him. Theophrastus could only regard the paradoxical styleof the work as the symptom of some mental derangement, somemelancholia, which caused Heraclitus to express himself 'sometimesincompletely and sometimes in inconsistent fashion'.45

We come closer to a correct reading of the signs with a Hellenisticcritic named Diodotus, who declared that the book was not aboutthe nature of things (peri physeos) after all but about man's life insociety (peri po lit eias)9 and that the physical doctrines serve only asillustration.46 This is an overstatement, but it points in the rightdirection. Diels came still closer to the mark when he observed thatHeraclitus was interested only in the most general conceptions ofIonian physics, and that his real starting point was 'I went in searchof myself.' Once he had encountered the law of the microcosm withinhimself, 'he discovered it for a second time in the external world'.47

I believe that Diels was right in locating the central insight ofHeraclitus in this identity of structure between the inner, personalworld of the psyche and the larger natural order of the universe. Thedoctrines of fire, cosmic order, and elemental transformations serveas more than illustrations; but they are significant only insofar asthey reveal a general truth about the unity of opposites, a truthwhose primary application for human beings lies in a deeper under-standing of their own experience of life and death, sleeping andwaking, youth and old age. If I have chosen as epigraph for this booktwo quotations from Spinoza and Unamuno, that is not because theyassert doctrines with which Heraclitus would have agreed but becausethey locate more precisely the focal point of his own philosophicalreflection: a meditation on human life and human destiny in the con-text of biological death. In Heraclitus' view such an understanding ofthe human condition is inseparable from an insight into the unifyingstructure of the universe, the total unity within which all opposingprinciples including mortality and immortality are reconciled. Itis this insight and this understanding which Heraclitus prizes as wis-dom (sophia) and which his whole discourse struggles to express. Thewar of opposites, the cosmic fire, the divine one which is also wisdomitself or 'the wise one' all these provide the framework withinwhich human life and death are to be understood, and to be under-stood means to be seen in their unity, like day and night (XIX, D.57). The ignorance of men lies in their failure to comprehend the

22 General introduction

logos in which this insight is articulated, the logos which is at oncethe discourse of Heraclitus, the nature of language itself, the struc-ture of the psyche and the universal principle in accordance withwhich all things come to pass. Heraclitus' grasp of this insight wouldhave been impossible without the new, philosophic conception ofcosmic order; and this sets him apart from the older Wise Men. Buthe belongs with them in the concern for wisdom as an insight intothe pattern of human life and the limits of the human condition.What they did not see and could not see before the birth of naturalphilosophy is that the pattern of human life and the pattern of cos-mic order is one and the same.

A fuller defense of this interpretation will be the task of the com-mentary. I conclude these introductory remarks by a glance at themost striking of the 'physical' fragments, in which Heraclitus isclearly responding to and transforming the doctrines of the naturalphilosophers.

The ordering (kosmos), the same for all, no god or man has. made,but it ever was and is and will be: fire everliving, kindled inmeasures and in measures going out. (XXXVII, D. 30)

Modern interpreters who look for a physical theory in Heraclitus haveseen here a denial that the world order was generated as a result ofany cosmogonic process such as the other natural philosophers hadassumed. But the emphasis of the wording and imagery suggests some-thing quite different.

The Milesians were concerned to show how the order of the worldhad come into being, how it was maintained, and (very probably) howit would eventually perish, only to be produced anew out of itseternal and inexhaustible source. Anaximander had conceived thisorder as governed from without, by the primordial Boundless; Xeno-phanes had replaced the Boundless with an intelligent deity whomoves all things by thought. Heraclitus accepts the Milesian view of aworld order in which the opposition and transformation of elemen-tary powers is governed by measure and proportion. But he deniesthat this order is imposed upon the world by any power from with-out. Instead, he deifies one of its internal constituents. For to saythat fire is 'everliving', that it 'ever was and is and will be' is to say,simply, that it is eternal and divine. Yet Heraclitus insists upon thefact that this god participates in the changing life of nature, 'kindledin measures and in measures going out'. There is a genuine parallelhere to Anaximenes' conception of the primordial Air. But Anaxi-menes would scarcely have emphasized the extinction of his principle

The doctrine 23

at the very moment that he asserts its eternity; nor would he haveidentified his elemental principle with the cosmos as such. What isstriking about Heraclitus' statement is that it confronts us with thedouble paradox of a world order identified with one of its constitu-ent parts, and an eternal principle embodied in the most transitoryof visual phenomena.

The resolution of these antinomies, concerning what is 'whole andnot whole' (CXXIV, D. 10), what is both mortal and everliving, mustawait the fuller commentary. The point of importance here is thatthe choice of fire as a substitute for air can scarcely have been motiv-ated by the desire for a more adequate physical theory: nothing isliterally derived from fire in the way that winds, clouds, and watermay be derived from air. Heraclitus' aim is not to improve theMilesian cosmology by altering a particular doctrine but to reinterpretits total meaning by a radical shift in perspective. The advantage offire for the new point of view is that it signifies both a power ofdestruction and death as in a burning city or a funeral pyre andalso a principle of superhuman vitality; a temporary phenomenonthat dies out or is quenched and an eternal principle that is every-where one and the same, whether in the altar flame, the domestichearth, the forest fire lit by lightning, or the blazing torches of war.By meditating on the fire one who knows how to read oracular signscan perceive the hidden harmony that unifies opposing principles notonly within the cosmic order but also in the destiny of the humanpsyche.

From Pythagoras of Samos, his neighbor and near contemporary,Heraclitus had learned a new conception of the destiny of the psyche,and perhaps also a new sense for the power of number, proportion,and measure in the rational organization of the world. But Pythagoras,like Xenophanes, provokes his particular scorn, for these two havetried to expand the philosophy of nature into a general vision of godand man and have, in his view, conspicuously failed.

It is precisely this task which Heraclitus undertakes. His real sub-ject is not the physical world but the human condition, the conditionof mortality. But by its participation in the eternal life cycle of natureand also by its capacity to master this pattern in cognition, the struc-ture of the psyche is unlimited (XXXV, D. 45). Mortals are immortal,immortals mortal (XCII, D. 62). The opposites are one; and thisdeathless structure of life-and-death is deity itself.

Introductory note to textand translation

I give here as a 'fragment' every ancient citation or report that seemsto provide information about the content of Heraclitus' book nototherwise available. Out of these 125 fragments, only 89 qualify asfully verbatim citations, and even this figure may be a bit too gener-ous. The other 36 texts, marked here by square brackets, form amixed bag. They include partial quotations blended with the citer'sown text, free paraphrases that may or may not preserve some of theoriginal wording, and some reports of doctrine that do not evenclaim to represent Heraclitus' words. Thus this second group of textsranges from borderline quotations, that might be counted among theliteral fragments, to doctrinal statements that could be listed withthe doxography (in Appendix II). At either end the division is arbi-trary. More significant, and less controversial, is the difference inprinciple between those passages where we have Heraclitus' ownwords and those where we do not. It is this distinction that I havetried to mark by the use of square brackets.

The translation aims at giving a readable version of Heraclitus'text, with as much literal accuracy as is compatible with the primarygoal of not making Heraclitus more obscure in English than he is inGreek. In some cases, for example in LXXIII, D. 58, this means thatthe translation will deviate slightly from what I print as the mostplausible text. In five cases (XLII, LXXII, LXXXI, XCV, and CXIII)I have combined two paraphrases in the translation or rendered themore reliable version. The glosses to the translation are designed toprovide the minimum of lexical and other information required for afair reading of the fragments. All substantive questions of scholarshipand interpretation are postponed to the commentary.

In presenting the Greek text I follow Marcovich's edition whereverpossible, but without his spacing and occasionally without his punc-tuation. The critical notes are designed to indicate significant discrep-ancy between Marcovich ('M.') and Diels-Kranz (T).'), and my owndivergences from Marcovich. The most important differences are the

26 Introductory note

following. In the case of XXXVII (D. 30), LXIII (D. 49), LXXXII(D. 80), LXXXVI (D. 86), CVIII (D. 77), CIX (D. 118), and CXXIII(D. 67), I reject an interpolation or emendation made by Bywater orDiels and accepted by most subsequent editors (except Bollack-Wismann, with whom I agree in these cases). In XXXII (D. 112) Iaccept the punctuation given by Bollack-Wismann, which cruciallyalters the sense. In the desperate case of LXXIII (D. 58) I follow thetext of Kirk, against both Diels and Marcovich.

The fragments

28I

I (D. 1, M. 1) Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos VII. 132TOV 5e Xoyov rovb ' eovros aiei d%vveTOiyivovTai av&pontOL Kaiirpoo&ev fj aKovoai Kai aKOVoavres TOirpcoTOV yivo\xevLov yapndvTCOV Kara TOV Xoyov Tovbe aiteipoiOLV eoiKaot -neipdo\xevoi KOLLeirecov KOLL epycov TOtovrecovoKolcov eyco duqyeviiat Kara ipvotvStatpecov eKaorov Kai ^ppa^oov 6/ccoc e'xer rovq 5e a\Xov(;

vs Xav^dvet OKOoa eyep&evres TTOLOVOLV OKoooirep bKooaemXavfravovrai.

II

II (D. 34, M. 2) Clement, Stromateis V.I 15.3a%vveroL biKOVoavres Kojipoiotv eotKaoc

29I

Although this account holds forever, men ever fail to comprehend,both before hearing it and once they have heard. Although all thingscome to pass in accordance with this account, men are like the untriedwhen they try such words and works as I set forth, distinguishingeach according to its nature and telling how it is. But other men areoblivious of what they do awake, just as they are forgetful of whatthey do asleep.

IINot comprehending, they hear like the deaf. The saying is their wit-ness: absent while present.

IllAlthough the account is shared, most men live as though their think-ing were a private possession.

IVMost men do not think things in the way they encounter them, nordo they recognize what they experience, but believe their ownopinions.

I account: logos, saying, speech, discourse, statement, report; account, explanation,reason, principle; esteem, reputation; collection, enumeration, ratio, proportion; logos istranslated 'account' here (twice) and also in III, XXVII, LX and LXII; it is rendered 'report'in XXXV, XXXVI and CI; 'amount' in XXXIX.

holds forever: text is ambiguous between 'this account is forever, is eternal' and 'thisaccount is true (but men ever fail to comprehend)'.III shared: xynos, common, in common, together: cf. same term in VI, XXX, LXXXII,XCIX.

thinking: phronesis, intelligence, understanding.IV think: phroneousi, understand, think straight; act with intelligence.

recognize: ginoskousi, know, be acquainted with; a recurrent theme: cf. XIX, XX, XXII,XXVII, etc.

believe their own opinions: heoutoisi dokeousi, lit. 'seem to themselves (to recognizeand understand)', or 'imagine for themselves': cf. LXXXIVLXXXV.

30

V

V (D. 7 1 - 3 , M. 69b1, 4, 3c, lh1) Marcus Aurelius IV.46[[aet TOV Tlpa/cXetretoi; j(there follows a version of XLI, D. 76)IJLfJLvf}0^at 5e /cat TOV eKikavdavoiievov fl V o5(k oiyei- /cat 6Vt ci

bfxCKovai (K&yop rop TOL bXa bwiKOvvn) TOVTCJL, KOLL ok /car?' ruxepav ejKvpovot, ravra ai;

i. Kai on ov Set oboirep KadeiiSovrocq iroieiv /cat

VI

VI (D. 89, M. 24) Plutarch, >e Superstitione 166C[[6 'Hpa/cAetrck

31V

[ [Men forget where the way leads . . . And they are at odds with thatwith which they most constantly associate. And what they meet withevery day seems strange to them . . . We should not act and speak likemen asleep.] ]

VI[[The world of the waking is one and shared, but the sleeping turnaside each into his private world.] ]

VIIHe who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it istrackless and unexplored.

VIII

Seekers of gold dig up much earth and find little.

V From Marcus Aurelius: 'Always bear in mind what Heraclitus said . . . about the manwho forgets . . . '

at odds with: diapherontai, differ from; quarrel with: cf. LXXVIII and CXXIV; most ofthis text seems to be a reminiscence of other fragments (CVI, D. 117; IV, D. 17; and I or VID. 89).VI From Plutarch: 'Heraclitus says that . . . '

32

IX

IX (D. 35, M. 7) Clement, Stromateis V.140.5Xpi? ev naKa iroXkcbv lOTopas i/JiXoad^ou? aVSpac elvai Kar?'

X

X (D. 123, M. 8) Philo, Themistius, etc.ipvotq KpvTrreo&aL

33IX

Men who love wisdom must be good inquirers into many thingsindeed.

X

Nature loves to hide.

XI

Let us not concur casually about the most important matters.

XII

[[In taking the poets as testimony for things unknown, they are citingauthorities that cannot be trusted.] ]

IX Men who love wisdom: philosophoi andres, philosophers: cf. sophon, wise, in XXVII,etc.

inquirers: histores, researchers, investigators; judges; eye-witnesses; Ionian science wascalled peri physeos historie, inquiry into the nature of things.X Nature: physis, character or nature of a thing.

loves: philei, tends; alternate rendering: 'The true character of a thing likes to be inhiding.'XI casually: eike, at random, perhaps with a play here on eikei, (concur) with likelihood.XII From Polybius: 'It would no longer be fitting to take poets and story-tellers as wit-nesses for things unknown, as our ancestors did in most cases, citing untrustworthy auth-orities on disputed points as Heraclitus says.'

34

XIIIXIII (D. 74, M. 89) Marcus Aurelius IV.46 (following citation Vabove)[[KOLL tin oh bel 7rai5a? TOKedovojv (sc. Ttoieiv /cat \eyeiv),rovreon Kara \\jikov KOL&OTI KapeCkriyoLixev.] ]

XIV

XIV (D. 55, M. 5) Hippolytus, Refutatio IX.9.5oo(jjv O\}JL

35XIII

[ [We should not listen like children to their parents.] ]

XIVWhatever comes from sight, hearing, learning from experience: this Iprefer.

XV[[Eyes are surer witnesses than ears.] ]

XVIEyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls do not under-stand the language.

XVIINot knowing how to listen, neither can they speak.

XIII From Marcus Aurelius (continuing V above); alternate rendering: 'we should not like children of our parents, in other words, in the way that has beenhanded down to us.'XIV learning from experience: mathesis, cognate with mathontes, they experience, in IV.XV From Polybius: 'According to Heraclitus . . . '

Eyes i.e. direct experience.ears i.e. hearsay.

XVI Literally, 'if they have barbarian souls (psychai)\ souls that do not speak Greek.For psyche, see on XXXV.

36

XVIII

XVIII (D. 40, M. 16) Diogenes Laertius IX. 1voov oh 8L86LOKL 'Holodop yap av ebiba^e Kal

Hv&ayopr}V, avris re "Eevo^pavea re KOLI 'EKOCTOLIOV.

XIX

XIX (D. 57, M. 43) Hippolytus, Refutatio IX.10.2be nXeLOTGJV lHato5oc# TOVTOV eTrtoravrat irXelora

eibevocL, OOTK; r\iiepr}v KOLI eb

37XVIII

Much learning does not teach understanding. For it would have taughtHesiod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus.

XIX

The teacher of most is Hesiod. It is him they know as knowing most,who did not recognize day and night: they are one.

XX[[Hesiod counted some days as good, others as bad, because he didnot recognize that the nature of every day is one and the same.] ]

XXI

Homer deserves to be expelled from the competition and beaten witha staff and Archilochus too!

XVIII Much learning: polymathie, learning many things, cognate with mathontes, mathesisin IV and XIV; term apparently coined by Heraclitus.

understanding: noos, mind, good sense, as in XXX and LIX.Hesiod, epic poet of early seventh century B.C., author of Theogony and Works and

Days.Pythagoras of Samos, philosopher and social leader of late sixth century.Xenophanes of Colophon, poet and philosopher-theologian of same period.Hecataeus of Miletus, contemporary world-traveller and rationalizing student of myth,

author of lost works on geography and legendary genealogies.XIX day and night: referring to Theogony 74857, where Day and Night meet oneanother as mythical figures moving in opposite directions.XX From Plutarch: 'Heraclitus attacked Hesiod for counting some days as good . . . ',referring to Works and Days 765ff., where lucky and unlucky days are distinguished.XXI beaten with a staff, with a rhabdos, standard instrument of bards and rhapsodes whocompeted in poetic performances.

Archilochus, lyric poet and author of comic invectives, seventh century B.C.

38XXII

XXII (D. 56, M. 21) Hippolytus, Refutatio IX.9.5ol av&pooTTOL irpds rr\v yvoooiv rcbv yavepoov

7rapotTT\r}OL(jj

39XXII

Men are deceived in the recognition of what is obvious, like Homerwho was wisest of all the Greeks. For he was deceived by boys killinglice, who said: what we see and catch we leave behind; what weneither see nor catch we carry away.

XXIII

[ [Homer was an astronomer.] ]

XXIV

[ [Thales practiced astronomy.] ]

XXVPythagoras son of Mnesarchus pursued inquiry further than all othermen and, choosing what he liked from these compositions, made awisdom of his own: much learning, artful knavery.

XXII In traditional versions of this story Homer, who is blind, dies of chagrin at not guess-ing the riddle.XXIII From scholia on Iliad XVIII.251: 'Heraclitus calls Homer an astronomer.'XXIV From Diogenes Laertius: 'Xenophanes and Herodotus express their admiration forThales . Heraclitus also bears witness to him .'XXV Pythagoras: see on XVIII.

inquiry: historie: see on IX.much learning: polymathie: see on XVIII.artful knavery: kakotechnie, the art (techne) of doing evil, another coinage of Heraclitus.

40

XXVI

XXVI (D. 81, M. 18) Philodemus, Rhetorica I, coll. 57, 62a TOV KHpaK\eLTOV KOTtiSojv eoTiv apxr?7(k.]]

XXVII

XXVII (D. 108, M. 83) Stobaeus III. 1.174OKOOGJV \&yovq rJKOVoa ouSeic bupiKveiTai e? TOVTO COOTOTL ooipov eoTi, itavTOiv

XXVIII

XXVIII (D. 101, M. 15) Plutarch, Adversus Coloten 1118C

XXIX

XXIX (D. 116, M. 15f = 23e) Stobaeus III.5.6iraoi IU.6TOTL jLveboKeLP eoovToix; Kal oooypoveiv.

XXVII I punctuate with Bollack-Wismann. Other editors read OTL ooyov eon TTOIVTCJV

41

XXVI

[[Pythagoras was the prince of imposters.] ]

XXVIIOf all those whose accounts I have heard, none has gone so far as this:to recognize what is wise, set apart from all.

XXVIIII went in search of myself.

XXIX

It belongs to all men to know themselves and to think well.

XXVI From Philodemus: 'Rhetoric . . . is, in the words of Heraclitus, the prince (archegos,initiator, founder, ring-leader) of imposters'; reference to Pythagoras is not certain.XXVII accounts: logoi: see on I.

what is wise: alternate punctuation: 'that the wise is set apart'.from all: panton, ambiguous between 'all men' and 'all things'. For sophon, wise, see also

XXXVI, LIV, and GXVIII.XXIX know themselves: allusion to the Delphic motto gnothi seauton 'Know (lit. recog-nize) thyself.

think well: sophronein, sound thinking, good sense; moderation, self-restraint; cognatewith phronesis, thinking, intelligence in III, phronein think, act with intelligence in IV andXXXI.

42

XXX

XXX (D. 114, M. 23a) Stobaeus III.1.179%uv voop XeyovTaq toxvpi^eo^at XPV T^? &vcb -navroov, OKtooirepvonip TrdXtc Kal TCOXV ioxvpoTepoiS-TpeyovTai yap iraVTes oiavtipdoTteioi voyLOL bird e^oc: TOV tieiov KpaTel yap TOOOVTOV OKOOOVedekei Kal e^apKel iraoi Kai itepiyiveTat.

XXXI

XXXI (D. 113, M. 23d) Stobaeus III.1.179%uvov eoTt Tiaot TO ypoveeiv.

XXXII

XXXII (D. 112, M. 23f) Stobaeus III.1.178ooiypoveiv apeTT} iieytOTTj Kal ooyiri, aXr}&ea X67et^ Kal TroteivKara

43

XXXSpeaking with understanding they must hold fast to what is shared byall, as a city holds to its law, and even more firmly. For all humanlaws are nourished by a divine one. It prevails as it will and sufficesfor all and is more than enough.

XXXI

Thinking is shared by all.

XXXII

Thinking well is the greatest excellence and wisdom: to act and speakwhat is true, perceiving things according to their nature.

XXXIII

The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither declares nor conceals, butgives a sign.

XXX understanding: noos: cf. XVIII.shared: xynos: see on III.by all: panton: ambiguous gender as in XXVII.divine one: henos tou theiou, similarly ambiguous between 'the one divine (thing)' and

'the one divine law'.suffices for all: pasi, same ambiguity: all things? laws? people?is more than enough: periginetai, is left over, survives intact; prevails over, surpasses. The

three terms 'with understanding' (xyn nooi), 'what is shared' (toi xynoi) and 'its law' (toinomoi) are linked by an untranslated word play. For the thought cf. LXV.XXXI Thinking: to phroneein: see on IV.

shared: xynon: see on III.by all: pasi: 'all things' or 'all men', as in the preceding.

XXXII Thinking well: sophronein: see on XXIX.excellence: arete, courage, military prowess; nobility, good breeding, distinction; virtue,

moral excellence; alternate punctuation: 'Sound thinking is the greatest excellence, and wis-dom is to speak things true and act according to nature by listening . 'XXXIII The lord i.e. Apollo.

44

XXXIV

XXXIV (D. 92, M. 75) Plutarch, De Pythiae Oraculis 397 AAa 5e iiaivoixevco OTO/JLan /cat?' 'Hpa/cAetro*; ayeXaora /cat

/cat afivpiora tpdeyyofievrj x^Xta;^ ercbv8ta rov &e6v.] ]

XXXV

XXXV (D. 45, M. 67) Diogenes Laertius IX.7t//t>Xf?C nelpoLTCL l(hv OVK av e^evpoto KOLGOLV eifiiropevoixevos bbovOVTOJ $oc&vv \vyov e

XXXVI

XXXVI (D. 50, M. 26) Hippolytus, Refutatio IX.9.1OVK efiov aXAci rov \6yov aKovoavms biioXoyelv oo^pov eonv ev

XXXVII

XXXVII (D. 30, M. 51) Clement, Stromateis V.103.6rov QLVTOV biitavToiv ovre r tc deoov ovre bi

eiroLTjoev, aXA' fju aei Kai eonv /cat eara t nvp aei^coov, bniTO[ievovfxerpa Kai bcnoofievvviievov juerpa.

XXXVI With some misgiving I accept the usual correction elvai for ei6eW in the MSS.XXXVII I give the text of Clement. Since By water most editors have added rovSe afternoofJLOv from an inferior variant found in Simplicius and Plutarch (who do not have TOPOLVTOV

45XXXIV

[ [The Sibyl with raving mouth utters things mirthless and unadornedand unperfumed, and her voice carries through a thousand yearsbecause of the god who speaks through her.] ]

XXXVYou will not find out the limits of the soul by going, even if youtravel over every way, so deep is its