1 Sext. Math. vii. 133, διὸ δεῖ ἕπεσθαι τῷ ξυνῷ. It seems to me that these words must belong to Herakleitos, though Bywater omits them. On the other hand, the words τοῦ λόγου δὲ ὄντος ξυνοῦ (so, not δ᾽ ἐόντος, the best MSS.) seem clearly to belong to the Stoic interpreter whom Sextus 1s following, and who was anxious to connect this fragment with fr. 2 (ὀλέγα προσδιελθὼν ἐπιφέρει) in order to get the doctrine of the κοινὸς λόγος. The whole context in Sextus should be read.
2 The words λόγῳ Tw τὰ ὅλα διοικοῦντι, which Diels prints as part of this fragment, seem to me to belong to Marcus Aurelius and not to Herakleitos.
154 Early Greek Philosophy
(96) The way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has. R. P. 45.
(97) Man is called a baby by God, even as a child by a
man. R. P. 45.
~ (98, 99) The wisest man is an ape compared to God, just
as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man.
-(100) The people must fight for its law as for its walls, Be F.4D,
(ro1) Greater deaths win greater portions. R. P. 49 a.
—(102) Gods and men honour those who are slain in battle.
~(103) Wantonness needs putting out, even more than a house on fire. R. P. 49 a.
(104) It is not good for men to get all they wish to get. It is sickness that makes health pleasant ; evil,! good; hunger, plenty ; weariness, rest. R. P. 48 b.
(105-107) It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire.? Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul. Rol. 49 ἃ:
(108, 10g) It is best to hide folly ; but it is hard in times of relaxation, over our cups.
(110) And it is law, too, to obey the ‘counsel of one.
~-(111) For what thought or wisdom have they? They
follow the poets and take the crowd as their teacher, knowing
not that there are many bad and few good. For even the
best of them choose one thing above all others, immortal
glory among mortals, while most of them are glutted like
beasts.2 R. P. 31 a.
~—(112) In Priene lived Bias, son of Teutamas, who is of more account than the rest. (He said, ‘‘ Most men are bad.”)
~(113) One is ten thousand to me, if he be the best. R. P. 31 a.
(114) The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves,
1 Adopting Heitz’s κακὸν for καὶ with Diels.
2 The word θυμός has its Homeric sense. The gratification of desire implies the exchange of dry soul-fire (fr. 74) for moisture (fr. 72). Aristotle understood θυμός here as anger (2 7. Mic. B 2, 1105 a 8).
ὃ This seems to be a clear reference to the ‘‘three lives.” See Chap. IT. § 45, p. 108.
Herakleitos of Ephesos 155
every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads ; for they have cast out Hermodoros, the best man among them, saying, ‘We will have none who is best among us ; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.” R. P. 29 b.
—(115) Dogs bark at every one they do not know. R. P. 31 a, ?
(116)... . (The wise man) is not known because of men’s want of belief. |
(117) The fool is fluttered at every word. R. P. 44 Ὁ.
(118) The most esteemed of them knows but fancies ;*
yet of a truth justice shall overtake the artificers of lies and
the false witnesses.
(119) Homer should be turned out of the lists and whipped, and Archilochos likewise. R. P. 31.
(120) One day is like any other.
~~(121) Man’s character is his fate.”
—(122) There awaits men when they die such things as they look not for nor dream of. R. P. 46 d.
‘ (123)... *that they rise up and become the wakeful + aaa of the quick and dead. ἈΚ. P. 46 d.
(124) Night-walkers, Magians, priests of Bakchos and ete of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.
— (125) ‘The mysteries practised among men are unholy bivstetins Be PS 48.
(126) And they pray to these images, as if one were to talk with a man’s house, knowing not what gods or heroes are.
~-(127) For if it were not to Dionysos that they made a procession and sang the shameful phallic hymn, they would be acting most shamelessly. But Hades is the same as Dionysos
1 Reading δοκέοντα with Schleiermacher (or δοκέοντ᾽ ὧν with Diels). I have omitted φυλάσσειν, as I do not know what it means, and none of the conjectures commends itself.
2 On the meaning of δαίμων here, see my edition of Aristotle’s Z¢hzcs, pp. 1 sq. As Professor Gildersleeve puts it, the δαίμων is the individual form of τύχη, as κήρ is of θάνατος.
3 T have not ventured to include the words ἔνθα δ᾽ ἐόντι at the beginning, as the text seems to me too uncertain. See, however, Diels’s interesting note.
156 Early Greek Philosophy
in whose honour they go mad and keep the feast of the wine- vat. R. P. 49.
-(129, 130) They vainly purify themselves by defiling them- selves with blood, just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing thus, would deem him mad. R. P. 49 a.
Shak aed 66. It will be seen that some of these fragments tradition. are far from clear, and there are probably not a few of which the meaning will never be recovered. We naturally turn, then, to the doxographers for a clue; but, as ill-luck will have it, they are far less instructive with regard to Herakleitos than we have found them in other cases. We have, in fact, two great difficulties to contend with. The first is the unusual weakness of the doxographical tradition itself. Hippolytos, upon whom we can generally rely for a fairly accurate account of what Theophrastos really said, derived the material for his first four chapters, which treat of Thales, Pythagoras, Herakleitos, and Empedokles, ee τὰ from the excellent epitome which he afterwards used, but from a biographical compendium, which consisted for the most part of apocryphal anecdotes and apo- phthegms. It was based, further, on some writer of Successions who regarded Herakleitos and Empedokles as Pythagoreans. They are therefore placed side by side, and their doctrines are hopelessly mixed up together. The link between MHerakleitos and the Pythagoreans was Hippasos of Metapontion, in whose system, as we know, fire played an important part. 1 On the source used by Hippolytos in the first four chapters of Ref i. see Diels, Dox. p. 145. We must carefully distinguish Ref i. and Ref. ix. as sources of information about Herakleitos. The latter book is an attempt to show that the Monarchian heresy of Noetos was derived from
Herakleitos instead of from the Gospel, and is a rich mine of Herakleitean fragments.
Herakleitos of Ephesos 157
Theophrastos, following Aristotle, had spoken of the
two in the same sentence, and this was enough to put
the writers of Successtons off the track." We are forced,
then, to look to the more detailed of the two accounts
of the opinions of Herakleitos given in Diogenes,’ which
goes back to the Vetusta Placita, and is, fortunately,
pretty full and accurate. All our other sources are
more or less tainted.
The second difficulty which we have to face is
even more serious. Most of the commentators on
Herakleitos mentioned in Diogenes were Stoics,? and
it is certain that their paraphrases were sometimes
taken for the original. Now, the Stoics held the
Ephesian in peculiar veneration, and sought to
interpret him as far as possible in accordance with
their own system. Further, they were fond of “accom- ,
modating” * the views of earlier thinkers to their own,
_and this has had serious consequences, In particular,
the Stoic theories of the λόγος and the ἐκπύρωσις are
constantly ascribed to Herakleitos by our authorities,
and the very fragments are adulterated with scraps of
Stoic terminology.
. 67. Herakleitos looks down not only on the mass The discovery
᾿ Ὁ 3 Ξ of Herakleitos of men, but on all previous inquirers into nature.
2 Arist. Met, A, 3. 984 a7 (R. Ρ. 56 ο) : Theophr. af. Simpl. Phys. 23, 33 (R. P. 36).
2 For these double accounts see Dox. pp. 163 sqq. and Appendix, § 15.
3 Diog. ix. 15 (R. P. 30 c). Schleiermacher rightly insisted upon this.
4 The word συνοικειοῦν is used of the Stoic method of interpretation by Philodemos (cf. Dox. 547 Ὁ, n.), and Cicero (W.D. i. 41) renders it by accommodare. Chrysippos in particular gave a great impulse to this sort of thing, as we may best learn from Galen, de Plac. Hippocr. et Plat. Book iii. Good examples are Aet. i. 13, 2; 28, 13 iv. 3, 12,—where © distinctively Stoic doctrines are ascribed to Herakleitos. What the Stoics were capable of, we see’from Kleanthes, fr. 55, Pearson. He proposed to
read Zed dvadwiwvate in 7]. xvi. 233, ὡς τὸν ἐκ τῆς γῆς ἀναθυμιώμενον ἀέρα διὰ τὴν ἀνάδοσιν ᾿Αναδωδωναῖον ὄντα.
158 Early Greek Philosophy
This must mean that he believed himself to have
attained insight into some truth which had not
hitherto been recognised, though it was, as it were,
staring men in the face (fr. 93). Clearly, then, if we
wish to get at the central thing in his teaching, we
must_try to find out what he was thinking of when he
launched into those denunciations of human dulness
and ignorance,» The answer seems to be given in two
/9 fragments, 18 and 45. From them we gather that
the truth hitherto ignored is that the many apparently
independent and conflicting things we_know are really
one, and that, on the other hand, this one is also many.
The “strife of opposites ” is really an “attunement”
(ἁρμονία). From this it follows that wisdom is not
a knowledge of many things, but the perception of the
underlying unity of the warring opposites. That this
really was. the fundamental thought of Herakleitos is
stated by Philo. He says: “For that which is made
up of both the opposites is one; and, when the one is
divided, the opposites are disclosed. Is not this. just
what the Greeks say their great and much belauded
Herakleitos put in the forefront of his philosophy as
summing it all up, and boasted of as a new dis-
covery?”* We shall take the elements of this theory
one by one, and see how they are to be understood.
ang 68. Anaximander had taught already that the
opposites were separated out from the Boundless, but
passed away into it once mere, so paying the penalty
for their unjust encroachments on one. another. It is
1 See Patin, Heraklits Einheitslehre (1886). To Patin undoubtedly belongs the credit of showing clearly that the unity of opposites was the central doctrine of Herakleitos. It is not always easy, however, to follow him when he comes to details.
2 Philo, Rev. Div. Her. 43 (R. P. 34 c).
Herakleitos of Ephesos 159
here implied that there is something wrong in the war
of opposites, and that the existence of the Many is a
breach in the unity of the One. The truth which
Herakleitos proclaimed was that there is no One
without the Many, and no Many without the One,
The world is at once one and many, and it is just the
“opposite tension”. of the Many that constitutes the
unity of the One.
The credit of having been the first to see this is
expressly assigned to Herakleitos by Plato. In the
Sophist (242 d), the Eleatic stranger, after explaining
how the Eleatics maintained that what we call many
is really one, proceeds, :—
But certain Ionian and (at a later date) certain Sicilian
Muses remarked that it was safest to unite these two things, |
and to say that reality is both many and one, and is kept together by Hate and Love. “For,” say the more severe Muses, “in its division it is always being brought together” (cf. fr. 59); while the softer Muses relaxed the requirement that this should always be so, and said that the All was alternately one and at peace through the power of Aphrodite, and many and at war with itself because of something they called Strife.
In this passage the Ionian Muses stand, of course;
for Herakleitos, and the Sicilian for Empedokles, We
remark also that the differentiation of the one into
many, and the integration of the many into one, are
both eternal and simultaneous, and that this is the
ground upon which the system‘of Herakleitos is con-
trasted with that of Empedokles. We shall come
back to that point again. Meanwhile we confine our-
selves to this, that, according to Plato, Herakleitos
taught that reality was at once many and one.
We must be careful, however, not to imagine that
Fire,
160 Early Greek Philosophy
what Herakleitos thus discovered was a logical principle.
This was the mistake of Lassalle’s book.’ The identity
in and through difference which he proclaimed was
purely physical; logic did not yet exist, and as the
principle of identity had not been formulated, it would
have been impossible to protest against an abstract
application of it. The identity which he explains as
consisting in difference is simply that of the primary
substance in all its manifestations. This identity had
been realised already by the Milesians, but they had
found a difficulty in the difference. Anaximander had
treated the strife of opposites as an “injustice,” and
what Herakleitos set himself to show was that, on the
contrary, it was the highest justice (fr, 62).
69. All this made it necessary for him to seek out a
new primary substance. He wanted not merely some-
thing out of which the diversified world we know might