(I) Difficulties and policy

A discussion of the thought of Heraclitus labours under peculiar difficulties. His own expression of it was generally considered to be highly obscure, a verdict fully borne out by the surviving fragments. Both in the ancient and the modem worlds he has provided a challenge to the ingenuity of interpreters which few have been able to resist. Perhaps not altogether unfortunately, most of the ancient commentaries have perished, but the amount written on him since the beginning of the nineteenth century would itself take a very long time to master. Some of these writers have been painstaking scholars, others philosophers or religious teachers who found in the pregnant and picturesque sayings of Heraclitus a striking anticipation of their own beliefs. If the interpretations of the latter suffer from their attitude of parti pris, the former may also be temperamentally at a disadvantage in penetrating the thoughts of a man who had at least as much in him of the prophet and poet as of the philosopher.

There is, then, an army of commentators, no two of whom are in full agreement. Nor are the doubts confined to the elucidation of a given body of writing. Diels-Kranz present 131 passages as fragments of Heraclitus, but it is a matter of lively argument how far they reproduce his actual words and how much is paraphrase or addition by the ancient writer in whose works they are found or a previous writer in whom he found them. Given an established fragment, there may remain to be resolved a doubt of its grammatical syntax, before one can proceed to wider questions of interpretation. This is an inevitable consequence of Heraclitus's intentionally oracular style, and was noticed as early as Aristotle (Rheu 1407b 11, quoted below, p. 407). The difficulty of expounding the fragments in translation needs no further emphasis: to translate is sometimes to have taken sides already in a disputed question of interpretation.