Hesiod, who did not know day and night are one
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διδάσκαλος δὲ πλείστων Ἡσίοδος· τοῦτον ἐπὶστανται πλεῖστα εἰδέναι, ὅστις ἡμέρην καὶ εὐφρόνην οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν· ἔστι γὰρ ἕν
Hesiod is the teacher of most men. They are sure he knew the most — he who did not recognize day and night: for it is one.
Preserved by Hippolytus (Refutation IX), immediately in the same sequence as B56. Hesiod, in the Theogony, made Day and Night distinct powers, born of different parents and never meeting. Heraclitus names him 'teacher of most men' — and then convicts him: the man everyone credits with knowing the most did not know that day and night are one thing.
Hesiod's Theogony ranks Day and Night among the primordial gods, each a separate being with its own descent; his Works and Days measures life by their alternation. Heraclitus turns this against him. To treat day and night as two is to miss that they are a single reality seen from opposite sides — the same span of time, the same turning, named twice. The 'teacher of most men' has taught them the very error that keeps them from the one pattern.
This is the unity of opposites in its plainest dress, and it prepares B58, B59, B61: good and bad, straight and crooked, life-giving and deadly, all 'one and the same.' The barb is aimed at <em>polymathiē</em>, much-learning — the same charge as B40. Knowing the most facts is no wisdom if you have not grasped that the opposites you carefully distinguish are one thing. Later readers, from the Stoics to Hegel, would take exactly this fragment as Heraclitus's signature move.
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