Heraclitus B25 · B25

The whole line turns on a near-pun a translation cannot keep: <em>moroi</em> (deaths, dooms) and <em>moiras</em> (portions, lots) chime as if death and one's allotted share were the same word bent two ways. Heraclitus is not merely saying the brave get rewarded; he is exploiting the old Greek sense of <em>moira</em> as the portion fate deals out — the same word Homer uses for a warrior's destined death. To die a greater death is to draw a greater lot.

What that greater portion is he leaves open, and the openness is the point. Read heroically, it echoes the warrior ethic of B24 ("gods and men honour the war-slain") and B29's "ever-flowing glory": a death in battle earns a larger destiny, a larger share of honour or of soul. Read against his physics, where the soul is a stage of the cosmic fire, a "greater death" might mean a drier, more fiery end — the death that keeps the soul from sinking into water. Either way the sentence refuses to let dying be simple subtraction; how one dies apportions what one becomes.

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