Heraclitus B83 · B83

B83 finishes the ladder B82 began. There the fairest ape was ugly beside a man; here the wisest and fairest man is an ape beside a god. The scale has a top rung we cannot occupy: <em>ho theos</em>, the divine, against which even human wisdom (<em>sophia</em>) and human beauty (<em>kallos</em>) show as the grimace of a monkey. The future verb <em>phaneitai</em>, 'will appear,' keeps the whole judgment in the register of appearance — this is how we look when finally measured, not a slander but a placement.

The fragment turns Heraclitus's contempt for human self-satisfaction into a cosmic proportion. Elsewhere he insists that for the god all things are fair and good and just, while humans have taken some to be unjust and others just (B102) — the divine sees the whole where we see the part. So the ape here is not merely ugly; it is the creature that mistakes its rung for the summit. Xenophanes had already mocked men for making gods in their own image; Heraclitus presses harder — set beside the real measure, the best of us is the thing we laugh at in the zoo. The rebuke lands hardest on <em>ho sophōtatos</em>, 'the wisest,' the very person most likely to think he has arrived.

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