[414]. In his note on fr. 66 (= 26 Byw.), Diels seeks to minimise the difficulty of the ἐκπύρωσις by saying that it is only a little one, and can last but a moment; but the contradiction noted above remains all the same. Diels holds that Herakleitos was “dark only in form,” and that “he himself was perfectly clear as to the sense and scope of his ideas” (Herakleitos, p. i.). To which I would add that he was probably called “the Dark” just because the Stoics sometimes found it hard to read their own ideas into his words.
[415]. Campbell’s Theaetetus (2nd ed.), p. 244. See above, p. 150, [n. 347]. Bernays explained the phrase as referring to the shape of the bow and lyre, but this is much less likely. Wilamowitz’s interpretation is substantially the same as Campbell’s. “Es ist mit der Welt wie mit dem Bogen, den man auseinanderzieht, damit er zusammenschnellt, wie mit der Saite, die man ihrer Spannung entgegenziehen muss, damit sie klingt” (Lesebuch, ii. p. 129).
[416]. See on all this Patin’s Quellenstudien zu Heraklit (1881). The sentence (Περὶ διαίτης, i. 5): καὶ τὰ μὲν πρήσσουσιν οὐκ οἴδασιν, ἃ δὲ οὐ πρήσσουσι δοκέουσιν εἰδέναι· καὶ τὰ μὲν ὁρέουσιν οὐ γινώσκουσιν, ἀλλ’ ὅμως αὐτοῖσι πάντα γίνεται ... καὶ ἃ βούλονται καὶ ἃ μὴ βούλονται, has the true Herakleitean ring. This, too, can hardly have had another author: “They trust to their eyes rather than to their understanding, though their eyes are not fit to judge even of the things that are seen. But I speak these things from understanding.” These words are positively grotesque in the mouth of the medical compiler; but we are accustomed to hear such things from the Ephesian. Other examples which may be Herakleitean are the image of the two men sawing wood—“one pushes, the other pulls”—and the illustration from the art of writing.
[418]. Plato’s exposition of the relativity of knowledge in the Theaetetus (152 d sqq.) can hardly go back to Herakleitos himself, but is meant to show how Herakleiteanism might naturally give rise to such a doctrine. If the soul is a stream and things are a stream, then of course knowledge is relative. Very possibly the later Herakleiteans had worked out the theory in this direction, but in the days of Herakleitos himself the problem of knowledge had not yet arisen.
[419]. E. Pfleiderer, Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee (1886).
[420]. Antisthenes (the writer of Successions) ap. Diog. ix. 6 (R. P. 31). Cf. Strabo, xiv. p. 633 (R. P. 31 b).
[421]. Köstlin, Gesch. d. Ethik, i. pp. 160 sqq.
CHAPTER IV
PARMENIDES OF ELEA
Life.