Heraclitus B104 · B104

A blast at the crowd's authorities. 'What νόος or φρήν have they?' — Heraclitus stacks two words for mind: νόος, the seeing intelligence that grasps how things stand, and φρήν, the older Homeric seat of thought lodged in the midriff, where a hero feels his own resolve. The people trust popular bards (δήμων ἀοιδοῖσι) and take the mob (ὅμιλος) for their teacher. There is a quiet trap in the pairing of διδάσκαλος with ὅμιλος: to make the throng your teacher is to be schooled by the very thing that most needs schooling.

The close — πολλοὶ κακοί, ὀλίγοι δὲ ἀγαθοί, 'the many bad, the few good' — is aristocratic to the bone, the same contempt for οἱ πολλοί that runs through B29, where the best choose one thing, undying fame, while the many gorge like cattle. It is worth remembering whom Heraclitus does honor: Bias of Priene (B39), the one man 'of more account than the rest.' The one against the many is not snobbery for its own sake but his standing complaint — that truth is not decided by counting heads.

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