Part 16

8. Seekers for gold dig much earth, and find little gold.

9. Controversy.

10. Nature loves to hide.

‘So we worship the creator of nature, because the knowledge of him is difficult.’

11. The Lord [whose is the oracle] at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.

12. And the Sibyl with raving mouth, uttering words solemn, unadorned, and unsweetened, reaches with her voice a thousand years because of the god in her.

Quoted by Plutarch to show that allurements of sense are out of place in the holy responses of the god. Both this fragment and the preceding seem originally to have referred to the nature of Herakleitos’s teaching; it is obscure, and yet divine.

13. What can be seen, heard, and learned, this I prize.

Hippolytos contrasts this with Fr. 47, and in this connection the translation of Schuster, ‘Am I to prize these (invisible) things above what can be seen, heard, learned?’ seems the more natural.

14. (For this is characteristic of the present age, when, inasmuch as all lands and seas may be crossed by man, it would no longer be fitting to depend on the witness of poets and mythographers, as our ancestors generally did), ‘bringing forth untrustworthy witnesses to confirm disputed points,’ in the words of Herakleitos.

15. Eyes are more exact witnesses than ears.

Cf. Bernays, Rhein. Mus. ix. 261 sqq.

16. Much learning does not teach one to have understanding; else it would have taught Hesiod, and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes, and Hekataios.

17. Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchos, prosecuted investigations more than any other man, and [selecting these treatises] he made a wisdom of his own—much learning and bad art.

18. No one of all whose discourses I have heard has arrived at this result: the recognition that wisdom is apart from all other things.

V. Teichmüller, i. 109 ff. on the idea of katharsis in Herakleitos.

19. Wisdom is one thing: [to understand the intelligence by which all things are steered through all things]; it is willing and it is unwilling to be called by the name Zeus.

The first two clauses follow Fr. 16 in Diog. Laer.; the idea in parenthesis often appears in Stoic writers.

20. This order, the same for all things, no one of gods or men has made, but it always was, and is, and ever shall be, an ever-living fire, kindling according to fixed measure, and extinguished according to fixed measure.

Zeller, i. 645 n. 1, discusses the various interpretations, and prefers to translate the first phrase ‘This world, the same for all,’ i.e. including gods and men.

21. The transformations of fire are, first of all, sea; and of the sea one half is earth, and the other half is lightning flash.

Zeller, i. 647 n. 1, regards πρηστήρ as identical with κεραυνός of Fr. 28. Burnett, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 153 n. 53, suggests fiery stormcloud, Seneca’s igneus turbo.

22. All things are exchanged for fire, and fire for all things; as wares are exchanged for gold, and gold for wares.

23. (The earth) is poured out as sea, and measures the same amount as existed before it became earth.

V. Lassalle, ii. 63; Heinze, Logos, p. 25; Schuster, p. 129; Zeller, i. 690 n. 1.

24. Want and satiety.

Context: Fire is intelligent and the governing cause of all things. Herakleitos calls it want and satiety. In his opinion want is the process of arrangement, and satiety the process of conflagration.

25. Fire lives in the death of earth, and air lives in the death of fire; water lives in the death of air, and earth in that of water.