Heraclitus B112 · B112

A rare piece of open counsel. σωφρονεῖν — soundness of mind, the self-possession the Greeks called <em>sōphrosynē</em> — is the greatest ἀρετή; and σοφία, wisdom, is to say true things and to act κατὰ φύσιν, according to nature, ἐπαΐοντας — 'giving ear' to it. The verb ἐπαΐω is a word of hearing: wisdom is cast as a kind of listening, an attunement to the way things actually are. That is the Logos of B1 again, the account 'according to' which all things come to pass, and which most people fail to heed even when they have heard it.

Two hidden threads run under the sentence. σωφρονεῖν is built from a 'safe' or sound φρήν — the very φρήν the crowd is said to lack in B104, so the greatest virtue is precisely the mind those men have not got. And κατὰ φύσιν, 'according to nature,' is the exact phrase the Stoics would take three centuries later as the whole of ethics — to live in agreement with φύσις. When they claimed Heraclitus as their headwater, this line is part of what they meant: wisdom is not cleverness but listening to nature and falling into step with it.

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