Brian Hamilton

Heraclitus’ Fragments

Fragment 43: [He used to say that] there is a greater need to extinguish hybris [that is, violence or insolence] than there is a blazing fire. (Diogenes Laertius 9.2)

Fragment 52: Lifetime is a child playing, moving pieces in a backgammon (?) game; kingly power (or: the kingdom) is in the hands of a child. (Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 9.9.4)

Commentary on Fragment 52, by T.M. Robinson: War (= the clash of opposites) is the principle of change underpinning the real. As king and father of the whole, it directs the operations of the whole. (Robinson 117)

Fragment 53: War is the father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free. (Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 9.9.4)

Fragment 67: God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and famine, and undergoes change in the way that fire?, whenever it is mixed with spices, gets called bythe name that accords with the bouquet of each spice. (Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 9.10.8)

Fragment 80: One must realize that war is common, and justice strife, and that all things come ot be through strife and are so †ordained†. (Origen, Contra Celsum 6.12)

Fragment 102: To god all things are fair and just, whereas humans have supposed that some things are unjust, other things just. (Porphyry Quaestiones Homericae)

Commentary on Fragment 102, by T.M. Robinson: ‘Justice’ for Heraclitus, as later for Plato, seems to mean the harmony/balanced tension of opposites. How the term is used will turn on context. (Robinson 148)

—Heraclitus, Fragments

17 February 2006 |
tags: Peace, Philosophy