Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/266

244 244 HISTORY OF Til II with certain attributes of the divine essence. " As the soul in us (says Anaximenes in an extant fragment),* which is air, holds us together, so breath and air surround the whole world." § 7. A person of far greater importance in the history of Greek phi- losophy, and especially of Greek prose, is Heraclitus of Ephesus. The time when he flourished is ascertained to be about the 69th Olym- piad, or B.C. 505. He is said to have dedicated his work, which was entitled " Upon Nature" (though titles of this kind were usually not added to books till later times), to the native goddess of Ephesus, the great Artemis -as if such a destination were alone worthy of it, and he did not consider it worth his while to give it to the public. The concurrent tradition of antiquity describes Heraclitus as a proud and reserved man, who disliked all interchange of ideas with others. He thought that the profound cogitations on the nature of things which he had made in solitude, were far more valuable than all the informa- tion which he could gain from others. " Much learning (he said) does not produce wisdom ; otherwise it would have made Hesiod wise, and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecatseus."t He dealt rather in intimations of important truths than in popular expositions of them, such as the other Ionians preferred. His language was prose only inasmuch as it was free from metrical shackles; but its expressions were bolder and its tone more animated than those of many poems. The cardinal doctrine of his natural philosophy seems to have been, that every thing is in perpetual motion, that nothing has any stable or permanent existence, but that everything is assuming a new form or perishing. " We step (he says, in his symbolical language) into the same rivers and we do not step into them" (because in a moment the water is changed). " We are and are not" (because no point in our existence remains fixed). X Thus every sensible object appeared to him, not as something individual, but only as another form of some- thing else. " Fire (he says) lives the death of the earth ; air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air; and the earth that of water ;"§ by which he meant that individual things were only different forms of a universal substance, which mutually destroy each other. In f In Diog. Laert. x. 1: vroXvpaQln v'oov oh Itbusx'.t (better than Quit)- 'Ho-loiov yu/> av id/S«5;£ xui YlvtSuyocvv, uiQ'i; n SivoQuvsci rl xui 'Exutuiov. All important passage on the first appearance of learning among the Greeks. Alleg. Horn. c. xxiv. p. 84. The image of a stream, into which a person cannot step twice, as it is always different, was used by Heraclitus in several parts of his work, in order to show that all existing things are in a constant state of flux. § Z>) wv{> tov yrti (dvurov, xui ario Zfi rov nrvpos Quvwrov, vbag Z,n rov dipt; Puvxrov, ytj <rov iiluTo;. Maxim. Tyr. Diss. xxv. p. 260. The expression that one thing lives the death of another is frequent in the {'ragmen's of Heraclitus, and generally be appears often to use certain fixed phrases.
 * Stobaeus, Eelog., p. 296.
 * WoTu.fji.oi; to~; uvro~$ lf*liecivof/.iv n xui eux lfcliu.ivoju.iV) itjjt.iv ti xui obx ltu.il, Heracht,