Not like children of our parents
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οὐ δεῖ ὡς παῖδας τοκεώνων…
We must not act like children of our parents…
Preserved by Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 4.46), who folds it into a note on living awake rather than by inherited habit. The sentence breaks off in a lacuna; the surviving clause warns against acting merely as our parents' children — that is, by unexamined tradition, as if handed our doings ready-made.
Marcus Aurelius keeps the line for its ethical sting: do not do things simply as παῖδες <em>tokeōnōn</em>, 'children of our begetters' — that is, because that is how they were handed down. A child receives its doings ready-made, without asking why, and Heraclitus, who elsewhere scorns those who live "as if they had a private understanding" (B2) yet follow the common <em>logos</em> in their sleep, is here refusing inherited habit as a ground for action. To act merely as one's parents' child is to act unawake.
The lacuna swallows the positive half of the thought, and the loss is real: we get the warning without the corrective. But the phrasing already leans on a Heraclitean move — the appeal to what is "handed down" (<em>kata to paradedomenon</em>, in Marcus's framing) as exactly what needs examining. Custom is not truth; being someone's child is not a reason. The fragment sits close to his complaint that most people are like sleepers, each turning aside into a world of his own instead of waking to the shared one.
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