Heraclitus B64 · B64

The verb is nautical: <em>oiakizei</em>, to work the <em>oiax</em>, a ship's tiller. The whole of things is a vessel, and its steersman is the <em>keraunos</em> — the lightning-bolt, the most sudden and destructive appearance of fire, the very sign of Zeus's power. Heraclitus's move is to identify the cosmic governor with fire in its most dramatic form: the same fire that 'kindles in measures and goes out in measures' (B30) and that will 'come on and judge all things' (B66).

By choosing the thunderbolt rather than a serene image, he keeps the divine steering violent and abrupt, not gentle — governance by the flash that splits the sky. It is the nearest the fragments come to naming a directing intelligence behind change, and it sits beside the claim that 'the one wise thing' both is and is not willing to be called by the name of Zeus (B32), and that fire is 'intelligent' (B64a). The Stoics, steering their whole physics by a fiery divine reason, read this fragment as their charter.

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