![]() Men deceive themselves in their knowledge of the obvious, even Homer the astronomer, considered wisest of all Greeks. Osa de oute eidomen out elabomen tauta heromen 22 Osa eidomen kai katalabomen tauta apoleipomen May wealth never fail you, men of Ephesus, so that your wickedness be proved!Įkeinon te gar paideV jqeiraV katakteinonteV The Ephesians deserve to be hanged to the last man, every one of them, and leave the city to the boys, since they drove out their most successful man, Hermodorus, saying "Let no one be the most successful among us if he is, let him be so elsewhere and among others" The best choose one thing in exchange for all, everflowing fame among mortals but most men have sated themselves like cattle. Oi de polloi kekorhntai okwsper kthnea 97 What wit or thinking do they have? They believe the popular poets and take the mob for their teacher, not knowing that "The many are worthless". Only dogs bark at what they do not understand:Ī fool loves to get excited at any new teaching. The esteemed man merely estimates but maintains he understands. The many are worthless, good men are few. Much learning does not teach common sense, for they would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus.īias son of Teutames who lived in Priene. Harmonies that are hidden are more powerful than those that are obvious. The path of the carding wheel is straight and crooked. The sea is the purest and the foulest water: for fish drinkable and life-sustaining for men undrinkable and deadly. They fail to recognise how things can diverge while being brought together it is a harmony that changes back, like that of the bow and the lyre. PalintropoV armonih okwsper toxou kai lurhV 78 Ou xuniasin okwV diajeromenon ewutwi sumjeretai They are at odds with what they have most continuous involvement:Īs they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow over them. Not knowing how to listen, neither can they speak. Gaining learning from what we see and hear: this I do prefer.īut eyes and ears are bad witnesses for men with barbaric minds: , the many do not think about things they way they find them, and do not gain understanding from their own experiences, but simply believe their own opinions. But then most people are as unconscious of what they do awake as they are forgetful of what they do asleep:įailing to comprehend after hearing, they learn like the deaf: the saying is their witness, absent while present.Īlthough this account is shared, the many live as though thinking things out were a private matter. Even though all happenings are in accordance with this account, people behave like the unlearned when they experience works and words whereas I set them forth, distinguishing everything according to its nature and telling how it is. Ginomenwn gar pantwn kata ton logon tondeĪlthough this account holds forever men fail to comprehend it, both before they hear it and when they first hear. The ordering of the fragments, apart from the opening paragraph, is of course conjectural: the relationship of the ordering given here with other translations is shown in the appendix. The numbers are references to the fragments in Kahn's translation. ![]() Heraclitus' words are of legendary opacity, and all of the fragments can be translated in many ways: the translation given here is partly new. Marcovich has pointed out by implication that Heraclitus wrote in free verse rather than straight prose. 500 BC) are included in the following text material shown in square brackets on the English side has been added by the editor and some small fragments and guesses in Marcovich's edition have been added in brackets to the Greek. This observation has inspired the tentative reconstruction offered here.Īll authentic quotations from Heraclitus (fl. Kahn suggests that the surviving fragments may well represent most of the original. 161-176 and Computing and Information Systems 3 (1996) p. ![]() This article appeared in Systemist 18 (1996) p. Heraclitus: a new translation of the fragmentsīest viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0.
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