Fragments Of Heraclitus Audiobook

Fragments Of Heraclitus audiobook with text and illustrations, and dramatized 🎵 with sound effects and music, by Audiobooks Dimension. 

Title : Fragments of Heraclitus
Author : Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος)
Written : 515 - 475 BCE
Place of Origin : Ancient Greece
Original Media type : Fragments, Papyrus
Original Language : Ancient Greek
Translator : Philip Wheelwright
Genre(s) : Ancient Greece, Collection, Philosophy, Quotations
Reader : Alan Rickman
Musician : Nature's Eye
Editor : AudioBooks Dimension

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Dramatized 🎵

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Heraclitus's Fragments Audiobook Chapters Time Stamps :

00:00:00 - Chapter I The Way of Inquiry
00:03:55 - Chapter II Universal Flux
00:05:38 - Chapter III The Processes of Nature
00:08:21 - Chapter IV Human Soul
00:11:49 - Chapter V In Religious Perspective
00:15:55 - Chapter VI Man Among Men
00:19:59 - Chapter VII Relativity and Paradox
00:23:54 - Chapter VIII The Hidden Harmony

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Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος) was an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from the city of Ephesus, which was then part of the Persian Empire. He wrote a single work, only fragments of which have survived. Most of the ancient stories about him are thought to be later fabrications based on interpretations of the preserved fragments. His paradoxical philosophy and appreciation for wordplay and cryptic, oracular epigrams has earned him the epithets "the dark" and "the obscure" since antiquity. He was considered arrogant and depressed, a misanthrope who was subject to melancholia. Consequently, he became known as "the weeping philosopher" in contrast to the ancient philosopher Democritus(Δημόκριτος), who was known as "the laughing philosopher".

So far as Greece is concerned, there are virtually no evidences of anything that could properly be called philosophy existing in earlier times. There are momentary flashes of philosophical insight in Hesiod’s Works and Days, in the so-called Homeric Hymns (whatever their dates may have been), and in the fragmentary sayings attributed to Orpheus and his followers ; but in none of them is there any intellectual coherence or any interest in finding a method for distinguishing truth from error. The ancient saying cited by Plato, that “God holds the beginning and the end, as well as the middle, of all existing things,’’ has been attributed to the legendary Orpheus, and it contains an arresting thought—especially if, as was usual with the Greeks, the ideas of beginning, end, and middle carried not only temporal but also moral meanings, connoting respectively
(1) principle,
(2) goal or fulfillment, and
(3) balance or proportion.
But the quotation stands virtually alone; most of the other early Orphic sayings are more burdened with mythological assumptions, and none of them reveals so clear an intellectual focus. In the gnomic poets of the seventh century, too, there are a few scattered utterances that show flashes of philosophic insight, but here again the occasional sense of significance is sporadic, unmethodical, and unpromising.

The first independent and sustained attempt to work out a philosophic view of the world is found in Ionia, to the east of Greece proper, in the sixth century. Here, in the seaport town of Miletus, Thales and his two successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes, began to ask questions in a new way. Described by ancient writers as “physiologues,” because they were seeking a reasoned understanding (logos) of nature (physis), they formulated—apparently for the first time in the Western world—the two great scientific-philosophical questions of What and How. The two things they chiefly wanted to know were: “What is the primary stuff of which the world is constituted?” and “How do the changes take place that bring about its manifold appearances?” Previously the nearest that the Greek mind had come to launching such inquiries was to ask not “What?” but “Who?” and not “How ?” but “With what purpose and intention?” The historical importance of Thales, as founder of the Milesian school, does not rest on his somewhat primitive and naive theory that all things are transformations of water, nor on the legends of his wizardry and absent-mindedness, but on the fact that he began the work of seeking for explanations of the natural world within the natural world itself. An understanding and formulation of the two questions—“What is basically real?” and “How does change come about ?’’—is far more important, both for clarity of mind and in terms of subsequent influence, than any possible answers that can ever, then or now, be given to them.

Thales’ greatest follower, Anaximander, made an attempt to answer the first of these questions by his conception of a boundless reservoir of potential qualities, out of which warmth or coldness, health or sickness, light or dark, and so on, would emerge into actual existence at certain times and places and subsequently would be reabsorbed into that boundless cosmic reservoir (to speak, as one must, metaphorically ) in which all things exist merely as potentials. Anaximander answered the second question by his conception—partly biological, partly ethical, partly religious—of what can most nearly be described as existential penance. “Things make reparation,” he declared, “and therein do justice to one another according to the order of time.” This is his one preserved statement of how a change from one quality to another—say from warmth to coolness in the atmosphere—comes about. The meaning can best be understood by looking at it in two perspectives successively. In biological perspective we can—on the analogy of an organism that grows, reproduces, and dies—regard a quality, such as summer heat, as coming into being, achieving full growth, and then, after a suitable time, making way for the opposite quality—in this case winter cold—which is to be conceived as going in its turn through the same life-cycle. In ethico-religious perspective the situation can be conceived through the typically Greek idea of hybris,,which can be roughly translated flagrant self-assertion. Now what Anaximander’s metaphysical imagination has done is to envisage the process of flagrant self-assertion together with its self-terminating outcome as applying not only to human life but to all existing entities whatsoever. The light of day, when it has asserted itself by existing for enough hours, must at length yield to the conflicting claims of the darkness of night, which has been lurking in a merely potential state, awaiting, as it were, its chance of bursting into actuality.

Anaximander’s doctrine, so far as it deals with the problem of change, is a forerunner of Heraclitus’ doctrine in two respects. In the first place it conceives of change in purely qualitative terms. That is to say, change is not, as it is for modern physical science, primarily spatial motion, or even measurable by some device of spatial motion or spatial distancing. It is essentially what it appears to be—the disappearance of one perceptual quality (say felt warmth or visible brightness or audible noise) while another and contrary quality (respectively, coolness, darkness, or silence) takes its place. Change is an ontological passage from contrary to contrary—from one perceptible state of being to its opposite. In the second place Anaximander conceives of the relation between contraries as in some sense a periodic interchange, exemplifying a cyclic and somewhat rhythmic principle—“according to the order of time.”

Anaximenes, too, the last of the three Milesian philosophers, although generally regarded as inferior to his immediate predecessor in philosophical stature, nevertheless offers two teachings that make him a significant forerunner of Heraclitus. First, he takes the primary physical reality to be air; for, as he argues in one of his few surviving fragments, “As our souls, being air, hold us together, so do breath and air encompass the entire universe.” His second thesis—of great historical importance in that it opened the way to the later employment of quantitative concepts in physical science—is the interpretation of change in terms of serial order. Every occurrence in nature, he holds, is a result and outward show of the rarefaction or condensation of air. Rarefaction eventually produces fire; condensation at successive stages produces cloud, water, mud, earth, and rock. Here evidently is something roughly analogous to Heraclitus’ “way up and way down,” and the question suggests itself whether Heraclitus may have been influenced by Anaximenes, or whether both philosophers may have drawn upon a common source; but unfortunately there is no evidence on which an answer can rest.

One further Ionian philosopher, not from Miletus and quite distinct from the trio just mentioned, invites consideration because of his possible bearing upon the thought of Heraclitus. Xenophanes was born in the Jonian town of Colophon, probably about a generation before Heraclitus, and he appears to have spent much of his time as a traveling minstrel, taking as the themes of his songs philosophical and religious ideas. Although his utterances are of a more open kind, less gnomic and paradoxical, than those of Heraclitus, there is a certain eloquent bitterness to be found in both philosophers, particularly as directed against prevailing stupidities of belief. In Xenophanes’ case the doctrine that is especially under attack is the popular mythology of the Olympian gods. The gods, taken plurally, he denounces as fictions in anthropomorphic guise. If horses could draw, he remarks, they “would portray their gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen.” We are victims, he could have said, using Bacon’s later figure, of idols of the tribe. Is there any escape from such idols? Yes, Xenophanes thinks, there is. We must practice the art of ridding our highest conceptions of all accidental, trivial, and self-mirroring qualities. As a result he arrives at the first clear statement of monotheism, so far as is known, in the West. “There is one God,” he declares, “the greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in form or in thought.” To be sure, since we regard this supreme One as divine, we must conceive Him as more excellent, not less so, than mortals, and this means that He must be somehow capable of thought and perception, for an entirely unconscious entity would not be worthy of reverence. Such thought and perception must not be conceived as dependent on organs, however; “it is in his entirety that he sees, in his entirety that he thinks, and in his entirety that he hears.’’ Nor does he have to exert himself in order to bring things about; “he accomplishes everything by the sheer thought of his mind.” He is, in short, the transcendent unifier and the principle of unity that resides amidst all change and multiplicity. Xenophanes has thus taken an important and apparently an original step in setting up the concept of a God divested of human attributes. His critical approach to philosophy through the religious problem complements the Milesian critical approach through the problem of nature. Metaphysics, or what we may call more precisely cosmology, involves both approaches ; they provide respectively the polar concepts of the One and the Many.

Two other philosophies, the Pythagorean and the Eleatic, need to be mentioned as partly contemporaneous with Heraclitus, and as just possibly having had some oblique influence upon him, although this is doubtful. Granted that both philosophies reached their peak of influence after the probable date of Heraclitus’ death, nevertheless in their earlier phases they may perhaps have been known to him in indirect ways. I am not arguing that this was so, but it is just as well to reckon with the possibility.

There is certainly no evidence or likelihood that Heraclitus had ever been influenced by Pythagoras directly. The two derogatory remarks, of doubtful authenticity, which he was later quoted as having made about the older philosopher may be found as Frs. 128 and 136. If he actually did make them, it must be admitted that he showed neither understanding nor sympathy toward Pythagoras and his teaching. Most of Pythagoras’ teaching, moreover, was done in Italy, in the little city of Crotona where he had established a brotherhood for the further pursuit of philosophy; and although he was probably older than Heraclitus by a generation, it is improbable that his views, which were carefully guarded, would have been carried to Ionia within a few years or decades. Finally, the two men, to judge by the available evidence, were sharply different in intellectual temperament. Pythagoras’ doctrine, compounded of mysticism, mathematics, cosmology, and music, is so alien to our current preconceptions that its original intelligibility is difficult to recapture; and while Heraclitus would not have opposed it for the same reasons as we, he was too fiercely individualistic to accept any such teaching from another, even if he had come in contact with it.

On the other hand, there is an ancient tradition that Heraclitus had been a pupil of the Pythagorean philosopher Hippasus of Metapontum. The tradition is too shaky to stand as evidence, however; for some scholars regard Hippasus as having postdated Heraclitus, and moreover Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras discredits his Pythagoreanism. The two firm facts about Hippasus are that he had been at one time a member of the Pythagorean brotherhood, and that like Heraclitus he believed that the universe is in a state of incessant change and that it consists of fire as its primal element. But whether he held the belief ahead of Heraclitus or drew it from him, is impossible to determine; and in any case so simple and general a congruity might, of course, have been coincidental.

The problem of Heraclitus’ relation to Parmenides of Elea again involves an uncertain question of comparative dates. A majority of scholars have supposed that Parmenides wrote his long poem on truth and appearance after Heraclitus had published his treatise on nature. Two main reasons for the conventional dating may be noticed. First, there is the evidence of Plato’s dialogue, the Parmenides, in which Socrates as a young man is represented as conversing with the aged Parmenides. Since Socrates was born in 469 BCE, the conversation (assuming that Plato did not invent it) would probably have taken place not earlier than about 450 BCE. In that case, whatever Parmenides’ exact age may have been at the time, it would seem probable that the writing of his philosophy would have taken place after, rather than before, the turn of the century, which was the time at which Heraclitus is said to have flourished. Secondly, there is the passage supposed by a number of scholars to refer to Heraclitus, in which Parmenides warns against “undisciplined crowds who hold that to be and not to be are the same and yet not the same, and that the way of things everywhere is παλίντροπος.” Although, as Zeller has pointed out, Heraclitus does not in any extant Fragment say that being and not-being are the same and not the same (and, incidentally, he can hardly be well described as an undisciplined crowd), yet the word παλίντροπος (“bending back,” “tension between opposites”) is so distinctive as to suggest the possibility of a deliberate reference to Fragment 117, where Heraclitus uses the same word.

Nevertheless, despite these rather strong evidences, it is not certain that Parmenides’ writing postdates that of Heraclitus. A scholar of independent mind, Karl Reinhardt, has argued with much learning and ingenuity that Heraclitus may have flourished as much as two decades after Parmenides, and that his theory of an ever-changing universe arose in reaction against Parmenides’ unworkable theory that change is unreal. Parmenides had argued that an intelligible view of the world is only possible to one who regards it as undifferentiated and static; Heraclitus (if Reinhardt’s redating is accepted) could be interpreted as retorting to Parmenides’ oversimple theory with the counter theory that intelligibility is to be found only in what is multiple and changing—only in strife itself. To be sure, Reinhardt’s dating has not won wide acceptance; nevertheless the possibility of Heraclitus’ having reacted against Parmenides in the manner described should doubtless be kept open.

Heraclitus himself was a native of Ephesus, an Ionian city some twenty-five miles north of Miletus and inland from the sea, and he is said by Diogenes Laertius to have flourished there in the sixty-ninth Olympiad, which would be roughly equivalent to 504 - 500 BCE. His family was an ancient and noble one in the district, and Heraclitus inherited from them some kind of office, partly religious, partly political, the exact nature of which is not clear, but it involved among other things supervision of sacrifices. Doubtless such an office was not congenial to a man of his impatient temperament, and he resigned it in favor of a younger brother. The banishment of his friend Hermodorus by a democratic government increased a natural antagonism to the masses and confirmed him in his philosophical withdrawal. So much is virtually all that can be known about Heraclitus with reasonable probability. Diogenes Laertius’ short essay on him in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a rather scatterbrained affair, and there is no reason to take seriously his fantastic account of the philosopher’s death by self-burial in a cow stall in a vain effort to cure an attack of dropsy. Such improbable tales were not uncommon about ancient “wise men,” and Diogenes provides more than his share of them; quite possibly their origin was etiological in that they grew out of popular misunderstandings of something that the philosopher had taught. In the case of Heraclitus we cannot even know whether it is true that he died of dropsy; the story could easily have been a figment suggested by his remark, “It is death for souls to become water.”

In temperament and character Heraclitus was said to have been gloomy, supercilious, and perverse. Diogenes calls him a hater of mankind, and says that this characteristic led him to live in the mountains, making his diet on grass and roots, a regimen which brought on his final illness. Such an account, however, is of the sort that could easily have been invented out of a general view of the philosopher’s character. At any rate, Heraclitus was certainly no lover of the masses, and his declaration, “To me one man is worth ten thousand if he is first-rate” (Fr. 84), makes it evident that he was not one to suffer fools gladly. He would have understood and approved of Nietzsche’s definition of the truly aristocratic man as one whose thoughts, words, and deeds are inwardly motivated by a “feeling of distance.’’ However, to call him a pessimist and compare him to Schopenhauer, as more than one interpreter of his writings has done, is to treat him in a misleadingly one-sided manner. Pessimism, where it is a philosophy and not just a mood, affirms the doctrine that there is more evil in the world than good, or that the evil is somehow more fundamental or more real. Heraclitus does not commit himself to so partisan a statement. His doctrine is rather that good and evil are two sides of the same reality, as are up and down, beauty and ugliness, life and death. The wise man attempts to set his mood by looking unflinchingly at both sides of the picture, not at either the bright or the dark alone.

So far as is known, Heraclitus was the author of a single book. Diogenes Laertius describes its subject-matter as ‘‘on nature,” adding that it was divided into three sections—on the universe, on statecraft, and on theology. According to that same sketchy biographer Heraclitus dedicated his book in the temple of Artemis and deposited a scroll of it there—a fairly usual practice in ancient Greece. The virtually unanimous opinion of ancient writers is that the book was hard to understand, and its author was frequently described by such epithets as the Dark, the Obscure, and the Riddling. Diogenes Laertius suggests that the obscurity may have been deliberate, in order that none might read the book who had not honored it with a suitable degree of intellectual effort. Since the Fragments that survive from it consist mostly of single sentences, we have little or no direct evidence as to how the various ideas in it were assembled, but their pithiness and profundity are still unmistakable, even though the original contexts have been lost.

Since Heraclitus is one of the subtlest, most impatient, and most paradoxical of philosophers, any attempt to reduce his doctrine to a few plain propositions could only result in distortion and caricature. Interpretations of his meaning have to be somewhat tentative, left open to the qualifications and reformulations that a thoughtful reader may wish to make as he reflects further on some of the dark sayings. There is always the danger, with Heraclitus as with any other ancient philosopher, of interpreting the ideas and the words—or someone’s chosen translation of the words—on the basis of contemporary presuppositions and distinctions, such as may have been absent, or nearly so, from the thought of an earlier age. We become subject, more than we are aware, to idols of the theater. In particular there are three modes of distinguishing, which seem quite natural to us today, but which are relied on to a far lesser degree in the thought and expression of Heraclitus: our grammatical distinction among parts of speech, our logical distinction between the concrete and the abstract, and our epistemological distinction between subject and object.

The distinction among parts of speech is less pronounced in the Greek language than in the Latin and its Western successors. Accordingly it is often impossible for a translator to find in a modern language the precise equivalent of some word or idiom in the Greek. The difficulty, indeed, is more than grammatical, it is ontological; for it concerns the kind of being which the different types of words are designed to indicate. Of particular interest are the three word-types of noun, adjective, and verb, together with the three modes of being for which they respectively stand—things, qualities, and events. The correlation is not absolute, to be sure; for we have to remind ourselves occasionally that an abstract noun such as “justice” does not indicate a thing, and that the copula “is” lacks the usual semantic properties of other verbs. But in general our contemporary Western languages keep a fairly steadfast distinction among the three types—nouns standing for things, adjectives standing for qualities, and verbs standing for actions and events.

Now in the thought of Heraclitus, abetted by the comparative fluidity of the Greek language, the linguistic distinction and correspondingly the ontological distinction are somewhat less firm. Consider Fr. 22, for instance: ‘‘Cool things become warm, the warm grows cool; the moist dries, the parched becomes moist.” Is Heraclitus speaking here about things or about qualities? The subject of the first clause is neuter plural preceded by the definite article, while in each of the three remaining clauses the subject term is a neuter singular without the article. Yet it is evident that the four clauses are parallel, and that the four subject terms are offered as representing parallel situations. The answer seems to be that scarcely any distinction was recognized between cool and warm things and the resident qualities of coolness and warmth. It was not until a century and a half later that Aristotle delineated the difference explicitly and showed what the intellectual penalty for ignoring it would be—a point to be developed in Chapter II. And in Heraclitus’ thought not only the ideas of thing and quality but also those of event and quality tend to coalesce and become confused. The latter confusion tends to be encouraged by the readiness of the Greek language to employ the infinitive of a verb preceded by the neuter definite article. Where such a construction appears in Fr. 10, for instance, it was translated “to be temperate,” although a more literal translation would be “the to be temperate,” and doubtless the sense of action (or potential action), quality, and thinghood were all present in it.

The coalescence between concrete and abstract is especially evident in Heraclitus’ central image-idea of fire. Regarding Frs. 28, 29, 30, and 32, the question has been raised: Is he speaking about actual physical fire, which burns and flares, or is he employing a picturesque symbol to denote incessant change? No one-sided answer can be maintained without doing violence to the doctrine; the true answer has to be—both! Goethe, who evinced a lively interest in Heraclitus after Schleiermacher had presented him with a first collection of some of the Fragments, defines a genuine symbol as a particular instance which is coalescent with a universal and which thereby plays a unique role by revealing, in a way that no other particular could quite do, the nature of that more general something. Fire, in Heraclitus’ doctrine, is a symbol in something very like the Goethean sense. It is the yellow, flaming, heat-giving actuality while at the same time it stands for the Heraclitean principle of universal unrelenting change.

The third type of coalescence that is more natural to earlier methods of thinking than to our own is found in the coalescence of subject and object, or knower and known, or thinker and thing thought. A comparison of Frs. 119 and 120 is instructive in this regard. Each of these Fragments begins with the same three words, stating that wisdom (more literally, the quality of being wise) is one, but they amplify the idea in different directions. Fr. 119 identifies this unitary wisdom with the divine power that is active in all things, and thus has a somewhat objective reference; Fr. 120 identifies the same unitary wisdom with the power of knowing that cosmic intelligence, and thereby has a somewhat subjective reference. Such is the distinction that tends to suggest itself to the modern reader, one of whose most complacent assumptions is that he knows how to draw the line between what is objective and what is subjective, and that except in certain rare and abnormal cases there is no difficulty in doing so. To an ancient thinker, on the other hand, whose mind would not have been conditioned (as ours has largely been) by the postulates of Cartesian dualism, the division between objective and subjective wore no such appearance of clarity and finality. The idea of what might belong to the one and what might belong to the other would vary according to mood and circumstance, and no precise question about it was ever raised. Heraclitus shows at times (as in Frs. 11, 12, I5, and 16) a strong, but not a clear, feeling for the question; Parmenides acknowledges its importance by building his poem upon a contrast between the way of truth and the way of opinion; but it was not until the age of the Sophists that Greek Philosophy had acquired the vocabulary and the dialectical skill to handle the question firmly. The Sophists’ own answer to it erred on the side of excessive subjectivity, and Plato in attempting to correct their error produced a certain amount of metaphysical muddle. Aristotle’s ingenious and promising attempt to solve the riddle’ is disappointingly incomplete, and in general it may be said that Greek philosophy never succeeded in grappling with the problem adequately. Perhaps it is just as well. A seeker after truth will fare best if he tries, whatever the intellectual inconveniences, to keep his categories and his ontological premises somewhat flexible. Such flexibility is what gives to much early Greek philosophy, and particularly to that of Heraclitus, its characteristic resilience and vitality.

These three kinds of semantic coalescence are not peculiar to the thought of the Greeks. With variations in detail they are to be found in much of the philosophical thought of ancient India, Iran, and China too. Because of them many of the remarks in the Upanishads, the Zend-Avesta, and the Tao Teh Ching appear dark and riddling, or on the other hand naive and superficial. In their clarity of thought, their sharpness of imagery, and their economy of ontological assumptions, the sayings of Heraclitus are more akin to the Tao Teh Ching than to the religio-philosophical documents of India and Iran, although they are doubtless more like these in their prophetic tone. In any case the lucidity that characterizes most of Heraclitus’ sayings (despite the ancient cliché to the contrary) must be understood on its own terms. It is sometimes subtly different from what passes for lucidity at the present day, and such difference is at bottom a difference in certain basic thought-forms, of which I have indicated three of the most prominent. A first step in trying to understand any writer, and particularly an ancient writer, is to exercise our “negative capability,” bracketing off our habitual ways of joining and distinguishing ideas wherever such ways differ from the writer’s own. This step is especially demanded by the flowing and often paradoxical thought of Heraclitus, and the cost of ignoring it would be a misleading oversimplification.

The central idea of Heraclitus' philosophy is the unity of opposites and the concept of change. He also saw harmony and justice in strife. He viewed the world as constantly in flux, always "becoming" but never "being".

This audiobook feature 1/2 of Heraclitus's Fragments book translated by Philip Wheelwright. It's represent only The Text part in order to preserve the archaic impression that prevails in the Greek. Therefore, for one who would plumb the depths of wisdom in Heraclitus's Fragments, the other half is indispensable.

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Persons mentioned in Heraclitus’s Fragments :

1. Archilochus (Ἀρχίλοχος) [c. 680 – c. 645 BCE] : a Greek lyric poet of the Archaic period from the island of Paros. He is celebrated for his versatile and innovative use of poetic meters, and is the earliest known Greek author to compose almost entirely on the theme of his own emotions and experiences.
2. Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος) : an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from the city of Ephesus, which was then part of the Persian Empire. He exerts a wide influence on ancient and modern Western philosophy, including through the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger. Little is known of Heraclitus's life. He wrote a single work, only fragments of which have survived. His paradoxical philosophy, appreciation for wordplay, and cryptic, oracular epigrams earned him the epithets "the dark" and "the obscure". He was considered arrogant and depressed, a misanthrope who was subject to melancholia. Consequently, he became known as "the weeping philosopher" in contrast to the ancient philosopher Democritus, who was known as "the laughing philosopher". The central ideas of Heraclitus' philosophy are the unity of opposites and the concept of change. He also saw harmony and justice in strife. He viewed the world as constantly in flux, always "becoming" but never "being". This insistence upon change contrasts with that of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who believed in a reality of static "being".
3. Hermadorus (Ἑρμόδωρος) : a native of  Ephesus whom Heraclitus believed to be the finest man among all of Ephesians.
4. Hesiod (Ἡσίοδος) : an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BCE, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded by Western authors as 'the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to play in his subject.' Three works have survived which were attributed to Hesiod by ancient commentators: Works and Days, Theogony, and Shield of Heracles. Only fragments exist of other works attributed to him.
5. Homer (Ὅμηρος) : a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history.

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Deities mentioned in Heraclitus’s Fragments :

1. Dionysus (Διόνυσος) : the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus (Βάκχος) by the Greeks for a frenzy he is said to induce called baccheia.
2. Erinyes (Ἐρινύες) : also known as the Eumenides or Furies, chthonic goddesses of vengeance in ancient Greek religion and mythology, that under earth take vengeance on men, whosoever hath sworn a false oath. According to Hesiod's Theogony, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitalia into the sea, the Erinyes (along with the Giants and the Meliae) emerged from the drops of blood which fell on the Earth (Gaia), while Aphrodite was born from the crests of sea foam. Their number is usually left indeterminate. Virgil, probably working from an Alexandrian source, recognized three: Alecto or Alekto ("endless anger"), Megaera ("jealous rage"), and Tisiphone or Tilphousia ("vengeful destruction"), all of whom appear in the Aeneid.
3. Hades (ᾍδης) : the god of the dead and the king of the underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea, although this also made him the last son to be regurgitated by his father. He and his brothers, Zeus and Poseidon, defeated their father's generation of gods, the Titans, and claimed joint rulership over the cosmos. Hades received the underworld, Zeus the sky, and Poseidon the sea, with the solid earth (long the province of Gaia) available to all three concurrently. In artistic depictions, Hades is typically portrayed holding a bident and wearing his helm with Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog of the underworld, standing at his side.
4. Zeus (Ζεύς) : the sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion and mythology, who rules as king of the gods on Mount Olympus. He was represent the brightness of day.

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Places mentioned in Heraclitus’s Fragments :

1. Delphi (Δελφοί) : an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient classical world. The ancient Greeks considered the centre of the world to be in Delphi, marked by the stone monument known as the Omphalos of Delphi (navel).
2. Ephesus (Ἔφεσος) : a city in Ancient Greece on the coast of Ionia. It was built in the 10th century BCE on the site of Apasa, the former Arzawan capital, by Attic and Ionian Greek colonists. During the Classical Greek era, it was one of twelve cities that were members of the Ionian League.
3. Hades (ᾍδης) : Greek underworld, a distinct realm (one of the three realms that make up the cosmos) where an individual goes after death. The earliest idea of afterlife in Greek myth is that, at the moment of death, an individual's essence (psyche) is separated from the corpse and transported to the underworld. In early mythology (e.g., Homer's Iliad and Odyssey) the dead were indiscriminately grouped together and led a shadowy post-existence; however, in later mythology (e.g., Platonic philosophy) elements of post-mortem judgment began to emerge with good and bad people being separated (both spatially and with regards to treatment).

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Terms mentioned in Heraclitus’s Fragments :

1. Ephesians : resident or native people of Ephesus (Ἔφεσος), a city in Ancient Greece on the coast of Ionia. It was built in the 10th century BCE on the site of Apasa, the former Arzawan capital, by Attic and Ionian Greek colonists. During the Classical Greek era, it was one of twelve cities that were members of the Ionian League.
2. Greeks : or Hellenes (Έλληνες), an ethnic group and nation native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Albania, Anatolia, parts of Italy and Egypt, and to a lesser extent, other countries surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea.
3. Logos (λόγος) : a term used in Western philosophy, psychology and rhetoric. Logos became a technical term in Western philosophy beginning with Heraclitus (c. 535 – c.  475 BCE), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge. Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean "discourse". Aristotle applied the term to refer to "reasoned discourse" or "the argument" in the field of rhetoric, and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and pathos. Pyrrhonist philosophers used the term to refer to dogmatic accounts of non-evident matters. The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos (the generative principle of the Universe) which foreshadows related concepts in Neoplatonism.
4. Night-walkers : refer to either prostitutes who works at night, or person who wanders at night which might alarm people (robber).
5. Sibyl (Σῐ́βυλλᾰ) : prophetesses or oracles in Ancient Greece. The sibyls prophesied at holy sites. A sibyl at Delphi has been dated to as early as the eleventh century BCE by Pausanias when he described local traditions in his writings from the second century CE. At first, there appears to have been only a single sibyl. By the fourth century BCE, there appear to have been at least three more, Phrygian, Erythraean, and Hellespontine. By the first century BCE, there were at least ten sibyls, located in Greece, Italy, the Levant, and Asia Minor.
6. Soul : the non-material essence of a person, which includes one's identity, personality, and memories, an immaterial aspect or essence of a living being that is believed to be able to survive physical death. The concept of the soul is generally applied to humans, although it can also be applied to other living or even non-living entities, as in animism.
7. The Bear : refer to Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear, a constellation in the northern sky, whose associated mythology likely dates back into prehistory.

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