Heraclitus B106 · B106

Plutarch quotes this against Hesiod, who in the Works and Days had catalogued the days of the month as holy or unfit, favorable for one task and ruinous for another. Heraclitus answers that the φύσις of every day is a single nature: no day is intrinsically luckier than another. It is his doctrine of unity brought down to the calendar, the same insight as B57, where Hesiod — 'teacher of most men' — is faulted for not knowing that day and night are one.

The force turns on φύσις. It does not mean 'nature' in our scenic, out-of-doors sense but the make-up, the constitution, the way-a-thing-is — the word that names the very theme of Heraclitus's lost book, <em>On Nature</em> (Περὶ φύσεως). To say every day has one φύσις is to say the differences the almanac trades in are laid on from outside, over a sameness underneath. It is the mundane face of the harder saying that the real constitution of things 'loves to hide' (B123).

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