Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Pamela Mensch & James Miller

Author:Pamela Mensch & James Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

Book 9

HERACLITUS

fl. c. 500 bc

XENOPHANES

c. 570–c. 475 bc

PARMENIDES

fl. early 5th cent. bc

MELISSUS

fl. 441 bc

ZENO

fl. early 5th cent. bc

LEUCIPPUS

late 5th cent. bc

DEMOCRITUS

b. 460/57 bc

PROTAGORAS

c. 490–420 bc

DIOGENES

fl. 425 bc

ANAXARCHUS

mid to late 4th cent. bc

PYRRHO

c. 365–275 bc

TIMON

c. 320–230 bc

Heraclitus and Democritus (detail), by Dirck van Baburen, early seventeenth century.

Heraclitus

1 Heraclitus, son of Bloson or, according to some, of Heracon, was a native of Ephesus; he flourished in the sixty-ninth Olympiad.1 He was exceptionally haughty and disdainful, as is clear from his book, in which he says, “Much learning does not teach understanding; otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, or, in turn, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.”2 For “what is wise is one thing: to understand thought, which steers3 all things through all.” He used to say that Homer should be thrown out of the public contests and beaten with a stick, and Archilochus likewise.4

2,3 He also used to say, “One should extinguish pride more quickly than a fire,” and “The people should defend the law as they would their city wall.” And he attacked the Ephesians for banishing his friend Hermodorus, in the passage where he says, “All the adults of Ephesus would do better to end their lives and leave the city to the children; for they have banished Hermodorus, the most useful man among them, saying, ‘Let there be no “most useful” among us; if anyone be such, let him go elsewhere and live with others.’” When asked by them to establish laws, he would not deign to do so, since by then the city was in the grip of a bad constitution. Withdrawing to the temple of Artemis,5 he would play at knucklebones6 with the children, and when the Ephesians stood around him, he said, “Why are you surprised, you rascals? Isn’t it better to do this than take part in your civic life?”

At last, having become a misanthrope, he departed for the mountains, where he lived on grass and herbs. But when this diet gave him dropsy, he returned to town and asked the doctors, enigmatically, if they could produce a drought after heavy rain.7 When they failed to understand him, he buried himself in a cowshed, hoping that the heat of the cow dung would draw the fluid out of him. But as even this had no effect, he died at the age of sixty.

“Knucklebones” (astragaloi) of the Greco-Roman world, third to second century BC. The one on the left is made of bronze; on the right of translucent cobalt blue glass.

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