Heraclitus on Pythagoras
Leonid ZhmudHeraklit im Kontext. Fantino E. et al., eds. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017, 173–187.
By the time of Heraclitus, criticism of one's predecessors and contemporaries had long been an established literary tradition. It had been successfully practiced since Hesiod by many poets and prose writers.¹ No one, however, practiced criticism in the form of persistent and methodical attacks on both previous and current intellectual traditions as effectively as Heraclitus. Indeed, his biting criticism was a part of his philosophical method and, on an even deeper level, of his self-appraisal and self-understanding, since he alone pretended to know the correct way to understand the underlying reality, unattainable even for the wisest men of Greece. Of all the celebrities figuring in Heraclitus' fragments only Bias, one of the Seven Sages, is mentioned approvingly (DK 22 B 39), while another Sage, Thales, is the only one mentioned neutrally, as an astronomer (DK 22 B 38). All the others named by Heraclitus, which is to say the three most famous poets, Homer, Hesiod and Archilochus, the philosophical poet Xenophanes, Pythagoras, widely known for his manifold wisdom, and finally, the historian and geographer Hecataeus -are given their share of opprobrium.² Despite all the intensity of Heraclitus' attacks on these famous individuals, one cannot say that there was much personal in them. He was not engaged in ordinary polemics with his contemporaries, as for example Xenophanes, Simonides or Pindar were.³ Xenophanes and Hecataeus, who were alive when his book was written, appear only once in his fragments, and even then only in the company of two more famous people, Hesiod and Pythagoras (DK 22 B 40). His fundamental complaints were directed against illustrious men of the distant and recent past, and in those cases where the grounds for those complaints are formulated or at least reconstructable, they are of a predominantly philosophical, or to be more precise, epistemological character. Heraclitus tries to assure his readers that he knows the truth which the others only pretend to know. From such a point of view it is quite natural that his main targets were Homer and Hesiod, known as the teachers of Greece. Both poets are mentioned three times, though Homer once in a seemingly neutral yet unclear context: he is simply called an astronomer (DK 22 B 105). In fragment DK 22 B 56 an epistemological charge can be very clearly identified: "Men are mistaken as regards the knowledge of the visible things, in the 1 , 149-153. 2 Babut 1976. 3 Zaicev 1993
