Heraclitus B80 · B80

The scandal of the line is the flat equation <em>díkēn érin</em> — 'justice is strife.' In ordinary Greek thought Dikē is what ends conflict: the goddess who settles the quarrel, restores the boundary, closes the case. Heraclitus makes her identical with the quarrel itself. If war (<em>polemos</em>) is 'common' — shared by all, the public condition of things, the same word he uses of the Logos — then the give-and-take of opposed forces is not a lapse from order but the way order is enforced. What looks like injustice from inside one side of the tension is, seen whole, exactly the balance being kept.

The closing pair, <em>érin</em> and <em>khreōn</em> ('strife' and 'necessity'), places Heraclitus in direct conversation with Anaximander, who had said the things that come to be 'pay penalty to one another according to necessity' (<em>kata to chreōn</em>) — as if becoming were a lawsuit endlessly settled. Heraclitus keeps the legal frame and removes the pathos: there is no injury to redress, because the strife is the justice. His near-contemporary Empedocles would split the two, making Strife the destroyer and Love the restorer; Heraclitus refuses the division and lets one process do both work.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear 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:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I
• Dom Casmurro — Brazilian Portuguese