A CRITICAL APPROACH TO THE USE OF TRADITION

Traditional narrative techniques constitute a repository of tools available to an author to draw upon in structuring his thought. These traditional techniques inform both the creation and interpretation of a given text. When an author chooses to use a traditional technique he knows that it will immediately be identified and even predicted by his audience.Footnote ¹ On the other hand, there is nothing so rigid as rules therefore the author has licence to change it. He can consciously alter a traditional technique to deceive his audience's expectations, attempting to make a greater impression with his words.Footnote ² Therefore, the use of a traditional narrative technique is an individual application of a general formula. It is always hard to coordinate the limits between the individual and general use, and even harder in the context of an oral culture in which rules have not yet been fully formalized nor is the concept of authorship well defined.Footnote ³

The relation of Heraclitus to his text is particularly hard to determine because the body of his work was composed in the transition from an oral to a written culture. This is proved by identifiable wordplay in his fragments that can depend upon both oral and written presentation of his text. For instance B114 makes use of the sound consonance of the graphically distinct ξὺν νόωι, ξυνῶι (‘with thought’, ‘common’) to relate these terms, while B48 uses the graphic equality of the distinctly pronounced ΒΙΟΣ (βίος, ‘life’/βιός, ‘bow’) to demonstrate their union. Moreover, Heraclitus' style can also be placed in the middle of another transition, that between poetry and prose. His extant fragments suggest that in composing he went beyond poetical conventions without however abandoning poetic formulae. He uses no metre and yet exploits several epic formulae, such as ‘gods and men’ or ‘it was, is, and will be’ in B30.Footnote ⁴ This twofold transitional situation furnished Heraclitus with an almost unrestricted use of language by which to structure and reveal his thought with such a personal style that he was frequently accused of obscurity.Footnote ⁵

A REASON FOR OBSCURITY

Heraclitus' obscurity was hardly an accident of the transitional period in which he lived, but rather cultivated by him as most readers ancient and modern have recognized.Footnote ⁶ A reasonable motivation for this obscurity comes into sight when we analyse the content and the purpose of his text. The main obstacle to discovering Heraclitus' purpose while revealing his thought is his apparent contempt towards mankind, that is, his audience.Footnote ⁷ The critical attitude that pervades his fragments seems to reject the possibility that his text may have been written in the way it is with his readers in mind.Footnote ⁸ In B1 it is said that ‘men become ignorant before and after hearing him’, and that they ‘act as having no experience while experiencing it’.Footnote ⁹ Among his criticisms, he identifies one of mankind's problems as a failure to realize that ‘all things come into being in accordance with the logos’. Despite the negative tone adopted in B1, the failure of men described there entails also a possible solution which is presented by B2 in a more positive prescription. The fragment states that men must ‘follow the logos common to all of them’ instead of their deceptive ‘particular comprehension’. Now, if people are ignorant because they do not understand their common logos, it is reasonable to suppose that his text was designed in part to provide a demonstration of how to follow this logos. And yet, if he wants to show them their own logos that until now most of them were not able to understand, he could not do it using the same kind of discourse (logos) that they are used to.

The pessimistic Heraclitus expects the majority of men to understand neither their logos nor his text, yet he knows that all of them have the common logos and thus are able to learn how to follow it. This approach fits the separation between the speaker and the logos presented in B50, in which he exhorts people to listen not to him (a particular comprehension) but to the logos (of which his text would be but an example).Footnote ¹⁰ To understand how he manages to show the common logos through his text it is necessary to decipher the relation between his style and the content of his text.

In B1 Heraclitus criticizes humans because they ‘fail to understand that all things come to be in accordance with this logos’. Thus, if his text aims to give people an understanding of their own common logos, as has been argued, it should show how things come to be. It is also said in B1 that he does it ‘in accordance with nature’. Heraclitus would probably understand by the ‘nature’ of a thing something like its whole process of ‘coming into being’.Footnote ¹¹ If this interpretation is legitimate, it seems plausible to infer that his discourse not only demonstrates the coming into being of things (their nature), but also their doing this in accordance with nature (with their coming into being). Thus the relation between the text and its object would be that of an imitation.Footnote ¹² B123 states that ‘nature loves to hide’ (ϕύσις κρύπτεσθαι ϕιλεῖ). This statement coordinates style (obscurity), content (the obscure subject) and the purpose (the aim) of Heraclitus' text. If a text is ‘in accordance with nature’ while talking about nature (‘the coming into being of things’, B1), which is cryptic (B123), it must be a cryptic text that, as his subject, will require some interpretation in order to be revealed. From this perspective a text with an obscure object could be nothing but obscure in such a way that the men who fail to understand nature because they do not follow their common logos will also fail to understand the text.

The analogy between dealing with nature and dealing with a text is reinforced by B107, where vision and hearing, senses through which men experience the world, are declared useless for those who have barbarian souls (κακοὶ μάρτυρες ἀνθρώποισιν ὀϕθαλμοὶ καὶ ὦτα βαρβάρους ψυχὰς ἐχόντων). In this case the adjective ‘barbarian’ (one who does not speak Greek) criticizes human incapacity to interpret experiences correctly, as if they were a text in a foreign language. The interpretative step required to understand nature would be the same as the step required to understand Heraclitus' text, in such a way as to argue that if one learns how to interpret a text it will become immediately clear how to interpret reality.

Heraclitus' stylistic strategy and the analogy between the interpretation of sensory information and the interpretation of language points to the difference between his style and that of others. In Heraclitus' time, one common distinction stressed in the methods available to acquire information was that between direct and indirect experience. The distinction is epitomized in the difference between seeing something and hearing about it from someone else. A text or a speech is usually the main example of hearsay – an indirect and thus less trustworthy method of acquiring information.Footnote ¹³ B101a endorses this conception in saying that the ‘eyes are more accurate witnesses than the ears’ (ὀϕθαλμοὶ τῶν ὤτων ἀκριβέστεροι μάρτυρες). But what Heraclitus seems to pursue in his strategy of revealing his thought through imitation is to provide his audience with a kind of direct information within the text. Thus, to understand the text, the hearer (or reader) will need to resort to the same non-barbarian soul (and common logos) used in the correct interpretations of the information he receives from vision. Willing to rescue men from their deceptive particular experiences, Heraclitus offers them the experience of a cryptic text that imitates his cryptic object, in the hope that in learning how to interpret one they will learn how to interpret the other. The aim of the text, to demonstrate the nature of things, is to be achieved through the imitation of the nature of things in such a way that those who learn how to interpret the text learn also how to interpret nature. This propaedeutic strategy seems appropriate to the way Heraclitus presents his ideas, namely not through the development of arguments but rather with analogies, similes and so on.

THE WORLD ORDER AS CHANGING OPPOSITES

Heraclitus' text is thus an attempt to show the nature of a thing, which entailed its process of coming into being, being and coming to an end. In Heraclitus' thought, this changing process seems reducible to one general formula, the so-called theory of the ‘union of opposites’, according to which each thing is in a process of change between opposites. That this tension between changing opposites is present in everything can be demonstrated in its indistinct application to various different types of ontological categories throughout his fragments, for example in B10 between day and night (phenomenon) and satiety and hunger (state), or in B126 between hot and cold (quality) and in B36 between water, earth and vapour (element).Footnote ¹⁴ Therefore the nature of all things (their changing between coming into being and coming to an end) explained through this unique process would represent the world order (cosmos). Unfortunately, this is exactly what men fail to realize because even if they identify the opposites they do not realize that they are part of the same process. In B51,Footnote ¹⁵ cited in the introduction, one can see the critique against men in Heraclitus' own words when he says that ‘they don't understand how what is in variance agrees with itself, a reciprocal stretching harmony as in the bow and the lyre’.Footnote ¹⁶

Once this world order has been established as a constant process of change between the things that constitute it, one might seek to define better how such a process occurs. The main possibilities for a definition are a cyclic or a rectilinear process of change whose movement can be either in one direction or reciprocal. For the most part Heraclitus' fragments show a rectilinear model of change from one thing to another (A ↔ B); this seems to be the more economic model for understanding a reciprocal movement between opposites.Footnote ¹⁷

There are several indications in Heraclitus' fragments of a model of reciprocal rectilinear change; for instance, the way up and down that is one and the same in B60,Footnote ¹⁸ the lighting and quenching of fire in B30, the hot things becoming cold and the cold things becoming hot in B126. All of these present a rectilinear reciprocal model of the type A → B, B → A, in which the direction of movement is back and forth rather than only in one direction, as in A → B → A.Footnote ¹⁹

A rectilinear reciprocal model brings yet another advantage in understanding Heraclitus' view of the process of change. It allows the movement to stop and go back to an anterior point before the whole cycle is complete. Thus if the world is fire, lighting and quenching it does not need to reach a total quenching to restart lighting. Also the changing from water to earth to vapour can stop with the predominance of earth and go back to water without necessarily achieving the vapour state. This interpretation allows one to understand the relation of three or more elementsFootnote ²⁰ through double oppositions, as in A → B, B → C, C → B, B → A’ and back again.

Motivated by this understanding of the world order as a series of reciprocal movements between opposites and the majority's incapacity to recognize this truth about reality, Heraclitus demonstrates this order throughout his text, both in the content and in the style, by adducing analogies of this relation. B36 is a good paradigm for viewing both his understanding of the world order and its representation in the order of his words.

THE WORLD ORDER IN THE ORDER OF WORDS

B36 offers Heraclitus' most complete and unanimously accepted exposition of a process of cosmic change. It says: ψυχῆισιν θάνατος ὕδωρ γενέσθαι, ὕδατι δὲ θάνατος γῆν γενέσθαι, ἐκ γῆς δὲ ὕδωρ γίνεται, ἐξ ὕδατος δὲ ψυχή (‘For souls death [is] to become water, and for water [death is] to become earth, and from earth water comes to be, and from water soul [comes to be]’). In terms of style, three narrative techniques are readily identifiable:Footnote ²¹ antithesis (the opposition of contradictory ideas), as in ‘death’ and ‘coming to be’; chiasmus (the presentation of terms with a reversal in the sequence), as in ‘souls’, ‘water’, ‘water’, ‘earth’ : ‘earth’, ‘water’, ‘water’ ‘soul’;Footnote ²² and ring composition (where the union of the fragment's beginning and ending is indicated by the repetition of the same word),Footnote ²³ as is presumably the case in ‘souls’ and ‘soul’.

What immediately calls for attention in B36 is the unexpected variation from the plural to the singular of its first and last terms: souls (ψυχαί) and soul (ψυχή). In attempting to provide an explanation for this unexpected variation, Betegh supposes that the plural refers to the souls as individuated things in living men,Footnote ²⁴ as a grouped plurality, while the singular refers to something like the stuff vapour, an uncountable mass.Footnote ²⁵ Following this interpretation, the process of cosmic change presented in B36 would start with a dying human soul that becomes water that becomes earth that becomes water that becomes vapour. At this final point Betegh, despite the differentiation he sees between ‘soul’ and ‘souls’, understands the structure to be a ring composition according to which the vapour in the end would be linked to the souls in the beginning, constituting thus a cyclic change.Footnote ²⁶

However, the majority of Heraclitus' fragments seem to point to a world order in which the reciprocal movement between the opposites is rectilinear, not to mention the fact that a cyclical model in which beginning and end are united to form a homogeneous whole makes it hard to understand how the strife between the opposites required for the process of continuous change would be maintained. Now, if enough weight is given to this unexpected variation between the first and the last element of the process described in B36, one can understand this anomaly as an attempt to show how the traditional view of the world as a cyclical process should be corrected to agree with the truth.

The recurrence of ring composition in Greek literature allows one to suppose that Heraclitus' audience would be used to it. Therefore while reading or listening to Heraclitus' B36 people might well anticipate that the movement that started with souls would end where it started. But instead of satisfying their expectation the philosopher breaks the ring composition with a subtle alteration of number in the last element. Through this variation from plural to singular he indicates not only a variation between souls and vapour but also a break in the traditional ring composition to represent a rectilinear reciprocal change which is a better model for understanding nature. To show that men are mistaken, the philosopher builds a trap in which they will be led to have their expectation thwarted. They have used a cyclical model to understand the world that was represented in the language by ring composition but, in correcting the ring composition with the introduction of a subtle difference between its first and last terms, Heraclitus demonstrates why they are mistaken. The real model of the world might look like traditional belief but it is different in the way that its movement is in fact reciprocal and its terms opposed. Reciprocity is represented by chiasmus, while the difference between its first and last terms ensures that they do not compose a homogeneous whole. If chiasmus in its simplest form is ABBA, and ring composition is A … … A, every chiasmus would be a ring composition, even if not every ring composition is a chiasmus. However, in presenting some difference between the first and last terms of the chiasmus, as in A (plural) … … A (singular), Heraclitus breaks this necessity of reading ring composition in his chiasmus in such a way that it could represent a rectilinear rather than a cyclical movement. Thus B36 represents the movement from soul to water, water to earth, earth to water, water to vapour and back again from vapour to water, water to earth, earth to water and water to soul.Footnote ²⁷

The rectilinear tension between opposed pairs represented in Heraclitus' fragments is analogous to the image of the bow that he uses in B51, so it seems plausible to name this narrative technique a ‘bow composition’. If there is a narrative technique developed by Heraclitus to represent his view of the world order that can be called a bow composition, it should recur in his fragments. And indeed we can find antithetical ideas exposed in a chiastic order in which the beginning and the end are not exactly the same throughout his corpus. In what follows, these cases will be examined. I divide them into three groups: chiasmus' predominance over antithesis, absence of chiasmus and their mixing in a chiastic antithesis.

CHIASMUS

Below I discuss the fragments united by displaying a chiastic structure which serves to emphasize the direction of movement according to which things change. B36, as analysed above, follows this pattern as well as B90 and B126 that will be analysed shortly. Although I do not discuss them here the fragments grouped as B76 should also be mentioned because two of its three versions, that cited by Plutarch (B76b) and Marcus Aurelius (B76c), employ chiasmus in representing the changing process of the cosmic elements.

B126 (Τὰ ψυχρὰ θέρεται θερμὰ ψύχεται, ὑγρὰ αὐαίνεται, καρϕαλέα νοτίζεταιFootnote ²⁸) falls into two halves with chiasmus in each. The first says ‘cold things become hot and hot things become cold’ and the second ‘moist things become dry and parched things become wet’. The change here, unlike that in B36, occurs not between cosmic elements but between qualities, yet the reciprocal movement is the same. In the light of Heraclitus' unclear treatment of ontological categories such as substances and qualities the situation described above is understandable as a movement from one thing (quality, substance or whatever) to another. Thus, at least at first, it is claimed that the hot thing is perceived as a different thing from the cold one, just as the element water is different from earth.

It is not hard for the majority of men to differentiate in this way between water and earth and, at least in the case of hot to cold and wet to dry, it is also easy to understand these as a part of the same process. That is why Heraclitus provides this trivial example, to establish what he will maintain also to be valid for the more sophisticated ones, namely that upon close analysis each pair of opposites should be seen as belonging to one and the same process. Therefore, after agreeing with the trivial example, that is, that the cold and the hot are united in a thing that suffers a process of change, men should also be prepared to accept that earth changes into water, and water into souls.

In fact, if one compares the choice of words in B126 with that in the fragments that deal with the process of change in the souls (B117–18), the step from a trivial situation to a cosmic one becomes even more evident. We have ψυχὴ (B117–18) and ψυχρὰ (B126), αὐὴ (B118) and αὐαίνεται (B126) and also ὑγρὴν (B117) and ὑγρὰ (B126).Footnote ²⁹ Therefore B126, in its content (from hot to cold, from moist to dry), in its style (chiastic structure) and in its choice of words, would provide a demonstration verifiable by anyone that the changing between opposites proves their union.Footnote ³⁰

The example presented in B126 reinforces once more the fact that change is reciprocal instead of cyclic, because the cold thing must go back the same way that it came to turn into a hot thing again, that is, the hot becomes cold and this cold in turn becomes hot. That is exactly what is represented in the text by the chiasmus AB : BA. Thus Heraclitus' text is not just giving an example by describing it indirectly, it is depicting the movement in a way that one who uses the common logos would see as a proof for the union of opposites.

Another interesting trait of B126 is the fact that in the second chiasmus the symmetry is subtly broken by the use of different terms to refer to what are arguably the same states. The ‘wet’ things become ‘dry’ and the ‘parched’ things become ‘moist’. As was seen in a fragment that deals with the bow (ΒΙΟΣ in B48) the use of the same term to point to different referents was used by Heraclitus as a proof of the union of opposites. Now, the use of different terms for the same referents appears to accomplish the same task.Footnote ³¹ In using different words for the same referent Heraclitus demonstrates the importance of the structure. In these cases the place of the word is more important than the choice of an identical stem. Despite the variety of words that men use to name opposites, the order of the world entailed in their referents remains.Footnote ³² Whether within terms that apply to cosmic process like the changing of the souls or within basic terms to describe common states, the point is that everything is in a process of changing into its opposite.

B90 reads πυρός τε ἀνταμοιβὴ τὰ πάντα καὶ πῦρ ἁπάντων ὅκωσπερ χρυσοῦ χρήματα καὶ χρημάτων χρυσός where the final part of the fragment presents a chiasmus in describing the commercial trade of ‘gold for goods and goods for gold’. This exchange serves as a simile for the opening where the cosmic organization through the exchange of ‘fire for everything and from fire to everything’ is presented. One notes that the fragment employs the same strategy that appears in B126 of using a common scenario to illuminate a cosmic process, but a difference between the two fragments is recognizable. Instead of two examples of chiasmus as is presented in B126, in B90 there is a parallelism of the type Ab : Ab (‘fire for everything and from fire to everything’) followed by a chiasmus of the type CD : DC (‘gold for goods and goods for gold’).

One might begin with the second part, the simile which illuminates the first, which complies with the pattern already observed. The change from gold to goods would represent a reciprocal movement in which those who buy something give gold and receive goods. Thus the exchange would be another practical and accessible example designed to guide men in understanding the hidden reality of things. The situation is even more prescribed because the amount of gold given is proportional to the goods that are acquired. Thus, even if once again the example is structured in a chiastic way to represent a reciprocal movement, this time a new characteristic is added, proportionality. That is to say, what one of the related opposites gains in the strife is exactly what the other one loses, since they are striving sides of the same process. He who gives more gold will have less gold and acquire more goods, just as the more heat one thing loses the colder that thing proportionally becomes. Since Heraclitus employs this image of exchange as an analogy for the cosmic process, proportionality would correspondingly also feature in the cosmic change. And indeed this seems to be the case in B30, in which a term like ‘in measures’ (μέτρα) is used in qualifying the lighting and quenching of fire meaning that the lighting is proportional to the quenching and vice versa, and in B31, in which the changing between the elements occurs a half for a half (ἥμισυ) in a process that can be measured according to the same measure (λόγος).Footnote ³³ It therefore seems plausible to recognize proportionality as a feature of the process of change in Heraclitus' view of the world order.

Now, let us return to the first half of the fragment where Heraclitus seems to adopt another model to represent the process of change. How should we interpret the parallelism of the type Ab : Ab, used to present the cosmic exchanging of fire for everything? A comparison of the fragments that present cosmic changes brings to light a pattern that can help us to understand it. In those fragments the recurrent chiastic structure appears only when the fire is not one of the parts involved in the process, as in B36 and the second part of B31. But whenever fire is present it assumes a leading role that is consistent with its position in the cosmic process, according to which all the cosmos can be reduced to fire, as in the first part of B31 and B90. It is also hardly a coincidence that these parts of the fragments that deal with fire are presented first. So parallelism would be the appropriate structure to represent this leading role of fire in the world by having it lead in the order of words. Thus Heraclitus structures his discourse in such a way as to place the main term, fire, always first, that is, in the most important position. Moreover, if one pays attention to the structure, one finds that, even if there is not a semantic chiasmus, there is at least a syntactic one, since the cases presented are genitive, nominative : nominative, genitive (πυρός, τὰ πάντα : πῦρ, ἁπάντων). Therefore, while presenting fire through a morphological parallelism B90 adapts the chiastic structure (maintained at the syntactic level) to emphasize that the main element, fire, is above the others because, like everything in the world, they can be reduced to or exchanged for it.Footnote ³⁴

ANTITHESIS

Heraclitus' fragments sometimes display a structure in which there is an identifiable opposition between the beginning and the end of the statement without the presence of chiasmus. In contrast to the previous cases the use of this direct opposition would not emphasize the ordering of the process of change, but would instead attempt to stress that what is usually perceived as contradictory is likewise united on a less apparent level. In the following cases Heraclitus attempts to overcome the common thought that opposites are separate by means of providing an unperceived relation between them. Paradigmatic examples are B20 and B21.Footnote ³⁵

B20 reads γενόμενοι ζώειν ἐθέλουσι μόρους τ’ ἔχειν, [μᾶλλον δὲ ἀναπαύεσθαι], καὶ παῖδας καταλείπουσι μόρους γενέσθαι (‘generated they want to live and have their destinies, yet to leave children is but death to generate’). The fragment presents in the beginning and the end the same word, γίγνομαι, with different inflexions, the participle and infinitive forms of the verb, in a way that may be seen as analogous to the variation of ψυχή/ψυχαί in B36. But in this fragment the coordination is even more complex because in the middle of this opposition there is yet anotherFootnote ³⁶ using the same term, μόρος, in different meanings,Footnote ³⁷ ambiguous in that it means both ‘destiny’ and ‘death’.Footnote ³⁸ This inner bow represents in a wordplay the connection between death and destiny while the outer bow assures us that what is necessarily entailed by being generated will be passed on to whatever that generated thing goes on to generate. Therefore from the coordination of the inner and outer bows the truth is revealed, that is, if destiny is death (for destiny is at once life and its end), then when someone generates a destiny by having a child (traditionally seen as a means of human immortality) it is in fact a death that she has generated. Thus in demonstrating that what is usually thought to be separate but in fact is united Heraclitus criticizes men who lay value in the μόροι that seem to transcend their individual μόρος without realizing that what they are generating is not immortality but death. In this case of two related antitheses demonstrating the union of opposites what is emphasized is not the movement from generation to death, which certainly occurs, but the fact that, since everything dies, every generation is already the generation of a death.Footnote ³⁹ In this way Heraclitus attempts to enlighten the mind of humans who see only the positive side of destiny, as implied in the first occurrence of μόρος in the fragment, ignoring the fact that it not only can but certainly will turn into its opposite and less appealing side, the death alluded to in the second occurrence of the word.

B21 θάνατός ἐστιν ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ὁρέομεν, ὁκόσα δὲ εὕδοντες ὕπνος (‘death is what we see when awake and what we see when asleep is sleep’) is a particularly interesting case because its ending was even subjected to a correction in an attempt to satisfy the condition that it should be in opposition to its beginning. The manuscript attests ‘death’ (θάνατος) as the first word and ‘sleep’ (ὕπνος) as the last one, but this use of ‘sleep’ where one would expect to see ‘life’ in opposition to ‘death’ breaks the fragment's symmetry. Some scholars, probably acting as an audience conditioned to anticipate a conclusion from the fragment's beginning, have felt this broken symmetry awkward enough to justify substituting ‘life’ (ὕπαρ) for ‘sleep’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such a substitution presupposes that the ‘awkwardness’ is not an intentional device used by Heraclitus to draw attention to a misconception, but we might wish to entertain the possibility that, in avoiding the expected ‘life’ as an opposition to ‘death’, Heraclitus could once again be setting a trap to demonstrate to his audience that reality is not quite how humans are accustomed to perceive it.

Any audience expecting to hear an opposition might anticipate ‘life’ as a conclusion after hearing ‘death’ at the beginning. If it were a possible reading, the unusual ὕπαρ for ‘life’ would be the lectio difficilior, since εὕδοντες could lead a copyist to misread the more common ὕπνος for ὕπαρ. But if the fragment was constructed in this way, it would mean that what we see when asleep is life. This would then best be construed in accord with the traditional belief that dreams tell humans truths about life.Footnote ⁴¹ One might, however, expect Heraclitus to be more critical (cf. n. 7), particularly when B1 uses the opposition between being awake and being asleep to criticize those who act as if they were asleep. Thus, it seems preferable not to assume that Heraclitus would support a conception in which dreams are maintaining and revealing some truth about reality.

On the other hand, this traditional conception that links dreams with reality supports the understanding of a connection between ‘death’ and ‘sleep’ in which sleep is a kind of death experienced in life.Footnote ⁴² In this case, ‘death’ and ‘sleep’ would be two nearly related terms in B21 like ψυχή in B36 and γίγνομαι and μόρος in B20.Footnote ⁴³ B21 also presents an inner relation between two terms where there is another opposition, that between being ‘awake’ and being ‘asleep’. We have seen that the union presented in the middle of B20 between ‘destiny’ and ‘death’ was used to demonstrate that men should see in every act of generation the generation of a death; thus, it would be legitimate to think that what a human sees when awake is death, as it is said in B20 (if we keep the words attested in the manuscript).

Heraclitus' critique of humans who act as if asleep (B1) also fits this reading, since those who insist on interpreting dreams in order to discover truths about life act as if asleep and miss both the obvious point that what they see when asleep is sleep and the not so obvious one that what they see when awake is death. Therefore, in changing the relation not only of ‘life’ and ‘death’, but also of ‘life’, ‘sleep’ and ‘death’, Heraclitus was trying to wake men from their dreams to life. The critique is complete. Awake, but acting as if asleep, men think they see life, not realizing that what they see is death. Asleep, they think they see dreams which relate to their life and their future, ignoring the fact that what they see seems to be reality but is only sleep. They also fail to recognize that if they want to see their future they should not turn to the interpretation of dreams but rather observe reality properly and realize that their future is nothing but death.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, while following common beliefs, human beings live a permanent illusion because they fail to understand that life is a reciprocal alternation between seeing death and sleep as represented in B21 through the bow composition.

There, I would argue, lies the explanation of B21's unusual stylistic feature, where Heraclitus defies audience expectation by presenting as a pair of opposites ‘death’ and ‘sleep’ instead of ‘death’ and ‘life’. Acting in this way, Heraclitus once more realizes what he says since, through the omission of the term ‘life’ (the expected opposite of ‘death’), he demonstrates that the men who live the illusion of ignoring death and who believe in dreams see nothing but what the fragment attests, ‘sleep’, and assume wrongly that there is present what is in fact missing in the fragment, namely life.

CHIASTIC ANTITHESIS

I now turn to the structural pattern in which a chiastic ordering of antithetical terms emphasizes both their movement and their opposition. To illustrate this I analyse B25 and B62, fragments that develop themes common to those analysed in the two sections above as life and death and its interchanging process.

B25 reads: μόροι μέζονες μέζονας μοίρας λαγχάνουσι (‘deaths that are bigger, bigger destinies receive’). Presented here is a recurrent chiastic structure AB : BA, entailing the notions of death and destiny. The fragment's first four words follow a chiastic structure with the first and the last words being once again two different but nearly related terms. Instead of using a single but ambiguous term μόρος as in B20, Heraclitus here uses different words to deal with the notions of death (μόρος) and destiny (μοίρα), which are themselves inherently related.Footnote ⁴⁵ This choice makes the chiasmus similar to the ones previously analysed, where beginning and end present two nearly related but subtly different terms in a choice that would break ring composition. On the other hand the core, typically chiastic, consists of the same term repeated twice with the same meaning, ‘bigger’. This repetition of a quantitative-qualitative term, ‘bigger’, like μέτρα in B30 and ἥμισυ in B31, points to a relation of proportionality in the fragment. As a bigger lighting of fire implies a bigger quenching of it, a bigger life would imply a bigger death.Footnote ⁴⁶ In addition, the chiastic structure depicts some movement or change between a bigger death and a bigger destiny.

The order of the terms is once again very interesting. Death precedes destiny in word order, which in a way goes against the common belief that the bigger the death, the bigger the destiny will be. While it is possible to think of an afterlife to understand this situation, it is not necessary:Footnote ⁴⁷ a great death allows a retrospective claim about the destiny of that man. One might attempt to define further this opinion which recurs in other fragments: the glory of a man will grow bigger not because he has a lot of children (B20), but because of his acts (B25), like dying on the battlefield (B24).

The use of the verb λαγχάνω (‘to receive by lot’) in a sense that is intimately connected with destiny at the end of the fragment breaks the symmetry of the chiasmus and seems to counter-stress the emphasis given to ‘death’, which appears in the prominent position. Through this counterbalance one could understand that, in a movement that questions predetermination, not only would a bigger death turn into a bigger destiny but also that a bigger destiny would turn into a bigger death. The bigger destiny should not imply the already dismissed predetermination, but it could be read as stating that what you make during your life will lead you to a death that is unavoidable but can be bigger.

B62 reads: ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες (‘immortals mortals, mortals immortals: these living the death of those and those dying the life of these’Footnote ⁴⁸). This fragment's chiastic antithesis seems more contradictory than that of B25 because its opposition is represented by a construction in which the antithesis is present at the morphological level. The two words repeated in the beginning ἀθάνατοι and θνητοί share of course the same root θν- (mort-), and are differentiated from one another by the negation of a privative alpha. These terms repeated in a chiastic order form the laconic statement: ‘immortals mortals mortals immortals’. The first thing to be determined is how many referents the first four words have. It was argued that Heraclitus' model for the process of universal change in the cosmos was that it occurred in pairs. Thus the first four words of B62 could depict a movement from mortal to immortal and from immortal to mortal, or from a mortal-immortal to mortal-immortal. Both cases argue for two referents, the first enacting a movement of the same type as that of a hot thing that becomes cold and a cold thing that becomes hot (B126), while the second presents a qualified variation : a bigger death that entails a bigger destiny (B25). However, these two options are not contradictory and could be read as complementary: one might think that mortal-immortal is the term for a mortal that becomes immortal and that immortal-mortal signifies an immortal that becomes mortal, yet that these qualified terms also partake in a reciprocal movement from the mortal-immortal to the immortal-mortal.

B62's sequence presents a less laconic description that seems to offer help in understanding the intricate relation of the first part. It speaks of ‘these living the death of those and those dying the life of these.’ Once again Heraclitus defies the audience's expectation: in saying that someone lives the death, not the life, and dies the life, not the death, he inverts the traditional accusative of internal object, in which the object was supposed to repeat the verb.Footnote ⁴⁹ This inversion implies that the rising of something depends on the perishing of another thing. Such a situation is coherent with an immortal becoming mortal, living the death and dying the life of a mortal – which could be termed an immortal-mortal – and a mortal becoming immortal, dying the life and living the death of an immortal – a mortal-immortal. Therefore, the chiasmus would describe the movement from an immortal-becoming-mortal to a mortal-becoming-immortal and back again. It makes sense but without determining the referents of the immortal-mortal and the mortal-immortal the solution remains excessively abstract. To help assist in this identification, we might turn to B36.

It was seen that the ψυχή variation from plural to singular represented a changing from ‘souls’ in an individuated man to a general state such as ‘vapour’ as an element. This process entails the relation between the changing microcosm, a man in whom the soul resides, and the changing macrocosm, the world order in which the elements are in a situation that seems to be adequate with the relation between mortality and immortality described in B62 and its apparent tension between an immortal-mortal becoming a mortal-immortalFootnote ⁵⁰ and back again. The ψυχή as a soul in a man is as mortal as he is but as vapour it is immortal as a cosmic element. Therefore, when a man, a mortal, dies, his soul starts the process of becoming vapour, an immortal element.Footnote ⁵¹ This change can be described as an immortal living the death of a mortal. On the other hand, while a man is living he has in his soul a part that after his death will rejoin the vapour, so the mortal is dying the life of the immortal. By implication the contrary may also be true. When a man is born it is expected that some amount of the stuff ‘vapour’ will be extracted to constitute his soul. Thus a mortal would be living the death of an immortal. As the vapour will give a part of its mass to constitute a human soul the immortal dies the mortal's life. That could be why the referents in the second part of the fragment are hard to determine. Being indeterminable allows both of them to apply to the two states of the first part, the immortal-mortals and also the mortal-immortals, in a way that would depict with more accuracy the world order according to Heraclitus' view, the unity of opposites.