by Heraclitus
An old drunk
leaning on a youngster,
saturated with bad wine,
head weaker than his feet . . .
74
Dry, the soul
grows wise
and good.
75
A dry light dries the earth.
76
See note.
77
A man in the quiet of the night
is kindled like a fire soon quenched.
78
Only the living may be dead,
the waking sleep,
the young be old.
79
Time is a game
played beautifully
by children.
80
Applicants for wisdom
do what I have done:
inquire within.
81
Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and is,
so I am as I am not.
82
The rule that makes
its subject weary
is a sentence
of hard labor.
83
For this reason,
change gives rest.
84
Goat cheese melted
in warm wine congeals
if not well stirred.
85
Corpses, like night soil,
get carted off.
86
The living, though they yearn
for consummation of their fate,
need rest, and in their turn leave
children to fulfill their doom.
87
In thirty years a newborn boy
can grow to father him a son
who grows by then
to father sons himself.
88
Thirty, therefore, names
the moon of generation.
89
Ex homine in tricennio potest avus haberi.
89
Look: the baby born
under the new moon
under the old moon holds
her grandchild in her arms.
90
Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work, and helps
make something of the world.
91
Since mindfulness, of all things,
is the ground of being,
to speak one’s true mind,
and to keep things known
in common, serves all being,
just as laws made clear
uphold the city,
yet with greater strength.
Of all pronouncements of the law
the one source is the Word
whereby we choose what helps
true mindfulness prevail.
92
Although we need the Word
to keep things known in common,
people still treat specialists
as if their nonsense
were a form of wisdom.
93
Fools seek counsel
from the ones they doubt.
94
People need not act and speak
as if they were asleep.
95
The waking have one world
in common. Sleepers
meanwhile turn aside, each
into a darkness of his own.
96
The habit of knowledge
is not human but divine.
97
The language of a grown man,
to the cosmic powers,
sounds like babytalk to men.
98
To a god the wisdom
of the wisest man
sounds apish. Beauty
in a human face
looks apish too.
In everything
we have attained
the excellence of apes.
99
The ape apes find
most beautiful
looks apish
to non-apes.
100
People ought to fight
to keep their law
as to defend the city’s walls.
101
The luckiest men die
worthwhile deaths.
102
Gods, like men, revere the boys
who die for them in battle.
103
Insolence needs drowning
worse than wildfire.
104
Always having what we want
may not be the best good fortune.
Health seems sweetest
after sickness, food
in hunger, goodness
in the wake of evil, and at the end
of daylong labor sleep.
105
Yearning hurts,
and what release
may come of it
feels much like death.
106
All people ought to know themselves
and everyone be wholly mindful.
107
To be evenminded
is the greatest virtue.
Wisdom is to speak
the truth and act
in keeping with its nature.
108
Not to be quite such a fool
sounds good. The trick,
with so much wine
and easy company, is how.
109
Stupidity is better
kept a secret
than displayed.
110
Sound thinking
is to listen well and choose
one course of action.
111
What use are these people’s wits,
who let themselves be led
by speechmakers, in crowds,
without considering
how many fools and thieves
they are among, and how few
choose the good?
The best choose progress
toward one thing, a name
forever honored by the gods,
while others eat their way
toward sleep like nameless oxen.
112
Not far from the ancient city
of Miletus lived
the son of Teutamas,
whose name was Bias.
I would have it known,
this one man more than others
earned the good esteem
of worthy people.
113
Give me one man
from among ten thousand,
if he be the best.
114
As for the Ephesians,
I would have them, youths,
elders, and all those between,
go hang themselves, leaving the city
in the abler hands of children.
With banishment of Hermodoros
they say, No man should be
worthier than average. Thus,
my fellow citizens declare,
whoever would seek
excellence can find it
elsewhere among others.
115
Dogs, by this same logic, bark
at what they cannot understand.
116
What is not yet known
those blinded by bad faith
can never learn.
117
Stupidity is doomed,
therefore, to cringe
at every syllable
of wisdom.
118
While those who mouth high talk
may think themselves high-minded,
justice keeps the book
on hypocrites and liars.
120
Unus dies par omni est.
119
Homer I deem worthy—
in a trial by combat—
of good cudgeling,
and Archilochos the same.
120
Any day stands
/>
equal to the rest.
121
One’s bearing
shapes one’s fate.
122
After death comes
nothing hoped for
nor imagined.
123
The revenant keeps watch
over the dead and living.
124
Nightwalker, magus,
and their entourage,
bacchants and mystics
of the wine press,
with stained faces
and damp wits . . .
125
Initiation, here,
into the ancient mysteries
so honored among men
mocks holiness.
126
They raise their voices
at stone idols
as a man might argue
with his doorpost,
they have understood
so little of the gods.
127
Dionysus is their name for death.
And if they did not claim
the statue of the drunk
they worshipped was a god,
or call their incoherent song
about his cock their hymn,
everyone would know
what filth their shamelessness
has made of them
and of the name of god.
128
A sacred ritual
may be performed by one
entirely purified but seldom.
Other rites belong to those
confined in the sodden
lumber of the body.
129
Tainted souls who try
to purify themselves with blood
are like the man
who steps in filth and thinks
to bathe in sewage.
130
Silence, healing.
Notes
On the order: This book retains, in all but a few places, the ordering and numbering of fragments from Bywater’s nineteenth-century arrangement, grouped by topic. My deviations from Bywater are noted below. In the early twentieth century, Diels believed that an alphabetical arrangement of the fragments, because it was random, was less tendentious. Wheelwright, on the other hand, observes that Diels himself has been tendentious in using the discontinuity of his arrangement to show that the writings of Heraclitus were not a coherent whole. In my translation, the ordering of fragments, word choice, transitional logic, emphasis on threads of meaning, and so on serve my own best inklings of a coherence and lucidity that have survived the destruction and imperfect representation of what Heraclitus wrote.1. Bywater 1 and 2 are transposed here to put the poetic passage about the Word first, as several translators have already done. The usual translation of the Greek logos has been “Word.” This reverberates with the diction in the Standard Version of the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” John must have had the powerful tradition of Heraclitean thought in mind when he used this term in his original Greek. Logos indicates not only the lexical word, but also all means of making ideas known, as well as ideas themselves, the phenomena to which ideas respond, and the rules that govern both phenomena and ideas. The holistic logic (logos) of this range of meanings must have been a large part of the word’s appeal, as the next fragment confirms. In the second sentence in the Greek, ambiguous syntax may suggest that Heraclitus separated the essences of things and said how each thing truly is. It may mean, on the other hand, that the ignorant fail to do this. The latter seems more plausible, since Heraclitus makes no other such personal claim for his accomplishment, but insists repeatedly on the limits of such claims, as in the next fragment.
2. See the note on 1.
9. The discussion of Heraclitus here omitted is from the Suda, or Suidas, an unreliable literary encyclopedia from about the tenth century C.E.
11. See the note on 12.
12. The Greek word Sibylla, or “Sibyl,” appears in this fragment for the first time ever. No one knows where it came from. Ton theon, “the god” of sibylline prophecy, Ho anax of the previous fragment, was the Lord Apollo, god of prophetic wisdom and of the cosmic fire of the sun. For more about the word theos, see the Introduction.
16. I have provided my own examples from Hesiod and Pythagoras in this and the next fragment, to illustrate their supposed folly. Heraclitus, no doubt, would have chosen other examples.
17. See note on 16.
24. The usual translation of koros, as satiety, gives the literal meaning, but loses the strong connotation of insolence, important to the personifying logic of this and many other fragments.
31. Jones’s literal translation of this fragment is: “If there were no sun, there would be night, in spite of the other stars.” Because the sense of the Greek seems incomplete, I introduce the questions into my translation, to suggest possible connections with the logic of reversal in fragments 35, 36, and elsewhere.
35. This rough paraphrase introduces the mention of gods and monsters to clarify the distinction between the polymorphous concreteness of Hesiod and the unifying abstract thought Heraclitus preferred.
36. The exact phrasing of the original Greek is difficult, but scholars agree about the general sense. I have simplified the second half, which says literally that fire mixed with various spices assumes various names.
41. This, the most famous fragment, is usually translated: “You cannot step in the same river twice.” According to Plutarch, Heraclitus says, “You cannot step into the same rivers twice.” My rephrasing tries to clear away distractingly familiar language from a startling thought. It seems unlikely to my mind that the ancient authors who refer to this idea quote Heraclitus exactly.
42. Here Stobaeus quotes Arius Didymus’s report of what Cleanthes thought about what Heraclitus said. I have omitted this as a less interesting and less reliable version of the same passage as reported by Plutarch in fragment 41.
51. Heraclitus is quoted as saying, “An ass prefers straw [or refuse] to gold.” Aristotle, who takes this to refer to food, does not say whether the reference to food is explicit in the original or his own inference.
53. This fragment, like fragments 89 and 120, exists only in a Latin paraphrase of the Greek.
54. This fragment is omitted as repetition of the second part of 53.
60. I have introduced a question here to compensate for a vagueness that seems to come from loss of context.
66. An untranslatable pun in this fragment involves the Greek words for bow and life, biós and bíos.
76. Fragments 74, 75, and 76 overlap. This translation separates the sense of 74 and 75, and omits 76.
89. This fragment, like fragments 53 and 120, exists only in a Latin paraphrase of the Greek.
112. The name of the town here is Phriene. But little is known about Phriene, so I mention nearby Miletus instead. Miletus was an important city from the heyday of Minoan culture until the Ionian revolt in Heraclitus’s time.
120. This fragment, like fragments 53 and 89, exists only in a Latin paraphrase of the Greek.
121. This fragment is often translated: “Character is fate.” More literally, a man’s ethos is his daimon. A person’s customary ways of being and acting, in other words, are that person’s guiding genius. I prefer the crisper phrasing, “Character is fate,” because the Greek is crisp, but meanings lost in the pithier version seem worth keeping.
129. Fragments 129 and 130 are transposed for the sake of resolution.
130. The one word, akê, has several meanings: silence, calm, lulling, healing.
Bibliography
The following books contain translations into English or commentary in English or both.