Opportunity Lost--Sixth Century B.C.!

Imagine your life�s work is pioneering in the field of philosophy. You are one of the first authors on record to decide that man has a soul or spirit and to discuss its separate and universal nature. You identify that there are four important elements (fire as well as earth, air, water), not just three, a theory that will affect everything from astrology to agriculture to medicine until about 1400 and beyond.

You offer your one manuscript up to the gods. Or specifically, your manuscript languishes in the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus but your reputation lives on, you are misquoted and misrepresented, and when your manuscript is recovered, it�s in small pieces due to floods, fires, and rain damage.

Good thing Heraclitus was a Stoic. Well, of course he was dead, too, so maybe it really didn�t bother him.

There�s a huge argument over whether this pre-Socratic philosopher wrote a treatise or a bunch of sayings. Somewhere in obscure corners of the Academy, philosophers labor over the scraps and the quotes from other sources, trying to put them in order and interpolate the thrust of his arguments. For now, with only fragments, I figure sayings are all we get. And they are the kind of thing that make you go huh.

�The way of writing is both straight and crooked.� Fragment 59

�The road up and the road down are the same road.� Fragment 60

Even the most profound people screw up. Heraclitus insulted a colleague, another pre-Socratic scholar. It's funny, but a big mistake. It's all the worse because it's his last word, the last fragment (129):

�Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, trained himself to the highest degree of all mankind in the art of investigation, and having selected these writings, constructed a wisdom of his own�a lot of learning, [for] a disreputable piece of craftsmanship."

Ahh, the Pythagorean Theorem, just to review:

He laughs best who laughs--first.

Heraclitus lived in Ephesus, now part of Turkey, from 535 to 475 B.C. The temple was rediscovered by archeologists in 1869.

References: Heraclitus, Fragments, Text and Translation with a Commentary by T.M. Robinson, U Toronto, 1987. Also, Heraclitus entry in Who's Who in the Classical World, Ed. Simon Hornblower and Tony Sawforth, Oxford UP, 2000. And Pythagoras and the Temple of Artemis' sad history, both at Wikipedia, illustrations by Wikipedia and onemathematicalcat.org