Part 19

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.

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).

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.