ABSTRACT
There is even more philosophy, in the strict sense of the word, in Heracleitos than in the Pythagoreans. Under the name of “polymathy,” he condemns the indulgence of Pythagoras and even Xenophanes 1 in particular inquiries which destroys the direct vision of the real. He is a headstrong, haughty genius who wishes to owe nothing save to the purely speculative intuition of the truth. Scornful of details, he develops the various aspects of that original intuition into a philosophy. He has the temperament of an inspired, solitary man, of a “melancholic,” as Theophrastos says. 2 In his native town, where his illustrious birth called him to a great part in affairs, he lived cut off from politics. A democratic revolution drove out his friend Hermodoros, perhaps the man who collaborated in the Law of the Twelve Tables. When the Ephesians thus gave the city over “to children,” they said, “Let no one be the best among us 1 Let any such go elsewhere, and among other men 1” 3 From this indication his book must belong roughly to the end of the first half of the Vth century. It seems to have been a collection of aphorisms in prose, in a language rich in imagery and antithesis, often incomprehensible, which earned Heracleitos his proverbial nickname of “the Dark.” This oracular style, which, as he himself says, 4 “neither expresses nor conceals thought, but indicates it;” suits a man with a strong, and even excessive, sense of his own superiority. Moreover, it is undeniable that the whole effectiveness of his ideas is often due to the conciseness of his phrases and the brilliance of his images. But the somewhat charlatanish note in his arrogant tone and Sibylline brevity could not fail to appear in a caricature like that drawn of the Master by the Heracleiteans of the end of the century.
