death, however, and wins "greater portions" for those who die it (fr. 101).
Further, just as summer and winter are one, and necessarily reproduce one another by their "opposite tension," so do life and death. They, too, are one, we are told; and so are youth and age (fr. 78). It follows that the soul will be now living and now dead; that it will only turn to fire or water, as the case may be, to recommence once more its unceasing upward and downward path. The soul that has died from excess of moisture sinks down to earth; but from the earth comes water, and from water is once more exhaled a soul (fr. 68). So, too, we are told (fr. 67) that gods and men are really one. They live each others' life, and die each others' death. Those mortals that die the fiery death become immortal,[1] they become the guardians of the quick and the dead (fr. 123);[2] and those immortals become mortal in their turn. Everything is the death of something else (fr. 64). The living and the dead are always changing places (fr. 78), like the pieces on a child's draught-board (fr. 79), and this applies not only to the souls that have become water, but to those that have become fire and are now guardian spirits. The real weariness is continuance in the same state (fr. 82), and the real rest is change (fr. 83). Rest in any other sense is tantamount to dissolution (fr. 84);[3] So they too are born once more. Herakleitos estimated the duration of the cycle which preserves the balance of life
- ↑ The word is used for its paradoxical effect. Strictly speaking, they are all mortal from one point of view and immortal from another.
- ↑ Those who fall in battle apparently share the same lot (fr. 102). Rohde, Psyche (II. pp. 148 sqq.), refused to admit that Herakleitos believed the soul survived death. Strictly speaking, it is no doubt an inconsistency; but I believe, with Zeller and Diels, that it is one of a kind we may well admit. The first argument which Plato uses to establish the doctrine of immortality in the Phaedo is just the Herakleitean parallelism of life and death with sleeping and waking.
- ↑ These fragments are quoted by Plotinos, Iamblichos, and Noumenios in this connexion (R.P. 46 c), and it does not seem possible to hold, with Rohde, that they had no grounds for so interpreting them. They knew the context and we do not.
