40

40. It scatters and brings together; it approaches and departs.

This follows the next fragment, as illustrating change.

41-42. You could not step twice in the same rivers; for other and yet other waters are ever flowing on.

43. Herakleitos blamed Homer for saying: Would that strife might perish from among gods and men! For then, said he, all things would pass away.

Aristotle assigns a different reason: For there could be no harmony without sharps and flats, nor living beings without male and female, which are contraries.

44. War is father of all and king of all; and some he made gods and some men, some slaves and some free.

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45. Men do not understand how that which draws apart agrees with itself; harmony lies in the bending back, as for instance of the bow and of the lyre.

V. Bernays, Rhein. Mus. vii. p. 94. Reading παλίντονος from fragment 56, we obtain the meaning ‘opposite tension’ more distinctly.

46. Opposition unites. From what draws apart results the most beautiful harmony. All things take place by strife.

Quoted by Aristotle as an illustration of the search for a deeper principle, more in accordance with nature.

47. Hidden harmony is better than manifest.

48. Let us not make rash conjectures about the greatest things.

49. Men who desire wisdom must be learners of very many things.

50. For woolcarders the straight and the crooked path is one and the same.

51. Asses would rather have refuse than gold.

52. The sea is the purest and the foulest water; it is drinkable and healthful for fishes; but for men it is unfit to drink and hurtful.

Quoted by Hippolytos as an example of Herakleitos’ identification of opposites.

53-54. Swine like to wash in the mire; barnyard fowls in the dust.

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55. Every beast is tended by blows.

Cf. Zeller, i. p. 724: ‘Every creature feeds on earth.’

(56. Identical with 45.)

57. Good and bad are the same.

58. (Good and bad are one; at any rate, as Herakleitos says) physicians, who cut and burn and in every way torment the sick, complain that they do not receive any adequate recompense from them.

59. Thou shouldst unite things whole and things not whole, that which tends to unite and that which tends to separate, the harmonious and the discordant; from all things arises the one, and from the one all things.

60. They would not have known the name of justice, were it not for these things.

According to the context in Clement ‘these things’ refers to injustice.

61. (God, ordering things as they ought to be, perfects all things in the harmony of the whole, as Herakleitos says that) for god all things are fair and good and just, but men suppose that some are unjust and others just.

Cf. Hippocr. de Diaeta (Bernays, Herakl. 22; RP 37 c) Accordingly the arrangements (laws) which men have made are never constant, either when they are right, or when they are not right; but the arrangements the gods have made are always right, both those which are right and those which are not right; so great is the difference between them.

62. Men should know that war is general and that justice is strife; all things arise and [pass away] through strife.

63. For they are absolutely destined....

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64. All the things we see when awake are death, and all the things we see when asleep are sleep.

For various interpretations, v. Teichmüller, i. 97 sq.; Zeller, i. 715; Patin, Einheitslehre, 19.

65. v. 19.

66. The name of the bow is life, but its work is death.

A similar play on words is found in Fr. 101.

67. Gods are mortals, men are immortals, each living in the others’ death and dying in the others’ life.

Cf. Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. iii. 230, R. P. 38.

68. For to souls it is death to become water, and for water it is death to become earth; but water is formed from earth, and from water, soul.

Clement quotes this as borrowed from Orpheus; and Hippolytos also found it in the poets.

69. Upward, downward, the way is one and the same.

70. Beginning and end are common (to both ways).

71. The limits of the soul you could not discover, though traversing every path.

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72. It is a delight to souls to become wet.

73. Whenever a man gets drunk, he is led about by a beardless boy, stumbling, not knowing whither he goes, for his soul is wet.

74. The dry soul is wisest and best.

Byw. 75. A dry beam is the wisest and best soul; Fr. 76. Where the earth is dry, the soul is wisest and best. If Fr. 74 is the genuine form, the corruptions are very early. We cannot, however, regard all three forms as genuine, and it is at least doubtful whether Fr. 75 expresses a Herakleitean idea. Zeller and others add to Fr. 74 the rest of the phrase in Plutarch, ‘flashing through the body as lightning through the cloud.’

77. Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.

78. Life and death, and waking and sleeping, and youth and old age, are the same; for the latter change and are the former, and the former change back to the latter.

79. Lifetime is a child playing draughts; the kingdom is a child’s.

Clement understood αἰών to be Zeus; Hippolytos made it equivalent to αἰώνιος, the eternal (king).

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80. I inquired of myself.

The translation follows the sense in Diogenes; in Plutarch it is parallel with the Delphic oracle, ‘I have sought to know myself.’

81. In the same rivers we step and we do not step; we are and we are not.

Cf. Fr. 41.

82. It is weariness to toil at the same things, and to be subject to them.

83. Changing it finds rest.

84. Even a potion separates into its ingredients when it is not stirred.

85. Corpses are more fit to be thrown away than dung.

86. Being born they wish to live and to meet death, [or rather to find rest,] and they leave behind children to die.

87. Thirty years make a generation, according to Herakleitos. 88. Not without reason does Herakleitos call a month a generation. 89. A man may become a grandfather in thirty years.

90. The sleeping are workmen (and fellow-workers) in what happens in the world.

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91. Understanding is common to all. It is necessary for those who speak with intelligence to hold fast to the common element of all, as a city holds fast to law, and much more strongly. For all human laws are nourished by one which is divine, and it has power so much as it will; and it suffices for all things and more than suffices.

92. And though reason is common, most people live as though they had an understanding peculiar to themselves.

93. With what they most constantly associate, with this they are at variance.

94. It is not meet to act and speak like men asleep.

Cf. Fr. 2 and 90.

95. They that are awake have one world in common, but of the sleeping each turns aside into a world of his own.

96. For human nature has not wisdom, but divine nature has.

97. Man is called a baby by god, even as a child is by man.

The translation is Burnett’s, following the suggestion of Petersen in Hermes xiv. 1879, p. 304. Fr. 98. And does not Herakleitos, whom you bring forward, say this very thing, that the wisest of men will appear as an ape before God, both in wisdom and in beauty and in all other respects? Fr. 99. You are ignorant, sir, of that fine saying of Herakleitos, that the most beautiful of apes is ugly in comparison with beings of another kind, and the most beautiful of earthen pots is ugly in comparison with maidenkind, as Hippias the wise man says.

100. The people ought to fight for their law as for a wall.

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101. Greater deaths gain greater portions.

102. Gods and men honour those slain in battle.

103. Wantonness must be quenched more than a conflagration.

104. It is not good for men to have whatever they want. Disease makes health sweet and good; hunger, satiety; toil, rest.

105. It is hard to contend with passion; for whatever it desires to get it buys at the cost of soul.

106. It is the part of all men to know themselves and to be temperate. 107. To be temperate is the greatest virtue; and it is wisdom to speak the truth and to act according to nature with understanding.

108. It is better to conceal stupidity, but it is an effort in time of relaxation and over the wine.

109. It is better to conceal ignorance than to put it forth into the midst.

110. It is law to obey the counsel of one.

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111. For what sense or understanding have they? They follow the bards and employ the crowd as their teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the very best choose one thing before all others, immortal glory among mortals, while the masses eat their fill like cattle.

112. In Priene was born Bias son of Teutamas, who is of more account than the rest.

Diogenes adds the apothegm ‘most men are bad.’

113. To me one man is ten thousand if he be the best.

114. The Ephesians deserve to be hanged, every one that is a man grown, and the youth to abandon the city, for they cast out Hermodoros the best man among them, saying:—Let no one among us be best, and if one be best, let him be so elsewhere and among others.

115. Dogs also bark at those they do not know.

116. As the result of incredulity (divine things) miss being known.

Either because men are incredulous, or the things incredible. Cf. Zeller, Phil. Gr. i.⁴ 574 A 2. Gomperz combined this with fragment 10.

117. The fool is wont to be in a flutter at every word.

118. The most esteemed of those in estimation knows how to be on his guard; yet truly justice shall overtake forgers of lies and witnesses to them.

If the reference is to Homer, read πλάσσειν, ‘knows how to create myths.’

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119. (He used to say that) Homer deserved to be cast out of the lists and flogged, and Archilochos likewise.

120. One day is equal to every other.

121. Character is a man’s guardian divinity.

122. There awaits men at death what they do not expect or think.

123. Then [it is necessary] that God raise them up, and that they become guardians of the living and the dead.

Or adopting Sauppe’s conjectures in full ‘that he become a watchful guardian....’

124. Night-walkers, wizards, bacchanals, revellers, sharers in the mysteries.

125. For what are esteemed mysteries among men they celebrate in an unholy way.

127. For if it were not to Dionysos that they made the procession and sang the song with phallic symbols, their deeds would indeed be most shameful; but Hades and Dionysos are the same, to whomever they go mad and share the revel.

128. I distinguish two kinds of sacrifices; those of men altogether purified, which would occur rarely, as Herakleitos says, in the case of a single individual, or of some very few men easily counted; secondly, those that are material and corporeal and composite through change, such as are in harmony with those who are still restrained by the body.

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129. (Herakleitos fittingly called religious rites) cures (for the soul).

130. They purify themselves by defiling themselves with blood, as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash it off with mud. If any one of men should observe him doing so, he would think he was insane. And to these images they pray, just as if one were to converse with men’s houses, for they know not what gods and heroes are.

130a. If they are gods, why do ye lament them? And if ye lament them, no longer consider them gods.

The fragment in the critical notes reads: ‘To images of gods they pray, to those who do not hear, as though they might hear; to those who do not answer, as though they might not make request.’

131. All things are full of souls and of divine spirits.

132. He was wont to say that false opinion is a sacred disease, and that vision is deceitful.

133. Each one who has come to be esteemed without due grounds, ought to hide his face.

134. False opinion of progress is the stoppage of progress.

135. Their education is a second sun to those that have been educated.

136. As food is timely in famine, so opportune favour heals the need of the soul.

137. The same one was wont to say that the shortest way to glory was to become good.

138. Timaios wrote thus: So Pythagoras does not appear to have discovered the true art of words, nor yet the one accused by Herakleitos, but Herakleitos himself is the one who is the pretender.

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