A man is an infant to a god
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ἀνὴρ νήπιος ἤκουσε πρὸς δαίμονος ὅκωσπερ παῖς πρὸς ἀνδρός
A grown man is called an infant by a divinity, just as a child is by a man.
Preserved by Origen (Against Celsus 6.12), just after B78, in the same argument that human wisdom is childish beside the divine. A man is called childish by a divinity exactly as a child is by a grown man — the scale of understanding shifted one full step upward.
The line sets up a proportion and lets it do the work: as a child stands to a grown man, so a grown man stands to a <em>daimōn</em>. The verb is <em>ēkouse</em>, literally "he heard himself called" — the way Greek says one "is reputed" or "goes by the name of" — so a man does not merely seem childish to a god, he answers to the name <em>nēpios</em>, infant. Whatever a man's fullest wisdom, it is nursery-talk one full step down from the divine, just as the gravest child is still only a child to us.
Heraclitus is the master of this kind of scaling insult — "the wisest man will appear an ape beside a god" (B83), "the most beautiful ape is ugly compared with the human race" (B82). Here the ladder is understanding, not beauty, and it cuts against every human claim to have arrived: the sage and the toddler occupy the same relative rung, each looking up at a maturity he cannot yet imagine. <em>Nēpios</em> is Homer's word for the fool who cannot see what is coming; a <em>daimōn</em> is the allotting power that shapes a life (B119, "character is a man's <em>daimōn</em>"). To be an infant before it is to be handled by a wisdom whose reasons we are too young to read.
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