Digging much earth for little gold
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χρυσὸν γὰρ οἱ διζήμενοι γῆν πολλὴν ὀρύσσουσι καὶ εὑρίσκουσιν ὀλίγον
For those who seek gold dig up much earth and find little.
Preserved by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata). An image of the search for truth: seekers of gold dig through much earth and find only a little.
On its face a plain observation about mining, but Heraclitus rarely offers a plain observation. The gold-seeker moves an enormous quantity of earth to recover a small quantity of gold, and the ratio is the lesson: what is most worth having is rare, and reached only by labor through a great deal that is worthless. Applied to knowledge — which is how Clement and the tradition took it — it is a rebuke to easy learning and a defense of hard, narrow digging over broad accumulation.
The image sits pointedly against B40's contempt for <em>polymathiē</em>, much-learning that does not teach understanding: piling up facts is heaping earth, not finding gold. And it answers B18, where the thing worth finding is untrackable and offers no road in — you reach it, if at all, only by digging. Gold is Heraclitus's recurring figure for what has real worth (B90, where fire and goods exchange like gold and wares); here the point is the cost of getting it. Truth is not scattered on the surface for whoever passes; it is <em>oligon</em>, a little, won from much.
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