Heraclitus B44 · B44

Diogenes Laertius (9.2) sets this among the political sayings. The people must fight for the law as they would for a city wall — <em>nomos</em> as the last defensive line of a community, the thing that, once breached, lets everything in.

The image is exact for a Greek <em>polis</em>: the wall (τεῖχος) was what separated the ordered city from the chaos outside, and its defense was every citizen's duty. Heraclitus transfers that duty inward, to the law. But <em>nomos</em> for him is never merely the local statute. In B114 all human laws 'are nourished by one divine law,' and in B33 law is 'obeying the will of one.' So the wall the people man is not just Ephesus's ordinances but the human share of a cosmic order — which is why even Heraclitus, who holds the crowd in contempt, sets it to defend the law it could never itself have made.

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