Aion, a child at play
Read the full text in our reader
αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη
Aion is a child playing, playing draughts; the kingship is a child's.
Preserved by Hippolytus (Refutation 9.9). Aion — lifetime, age, the span of time itself — is a child playing, playing at draughts; the kingship belongs to a child.
Hippolytus preserves this (Refutation 9.9), and it is among Heraclitus's strangest sayings. <em>Aiōn</em> — lifetime, age, the span of time itself — is a child playing, playing at draughts; the kingship belongs to a child.
<em>Aiōn</em> is not clock-time (that is χρόνος) but the living duration of a life or an age, and Heraclitus makes it a boy at a board game, moving pieces by rules that are real but not serious, arranging and scattering for the pleasure of it. The word <em>basilēiē</em>, kingship, deliberately echoes B53, where war is 'king of all' — but the sovereign here is a child at play, and the order of the world is the order of a game: patterned, lawful, and without ulterior purpose. There is no cruelty in it and no mercy; a child does not hate the pieces he takes. Later readers have heard in the line everything from divine providence to Nietzsche's 'innocence of becoming,' the world-process as play beyond good and evil. Heraclitus says only: the one who rules time is a child.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Heraclitus B52 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Heraclitus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Heraclitus B52 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/heraclitus/B52/