The same: living and dead, waking and sleeping
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ταὐτὸ ζῶν καὶ τεθνηκὸς καὶ ἐγρηγορὸς καὶ καθεῦδον καὶ νέον καὶ γηραιόν· τάδε γὰρ μεταπεσόντα ἐκεῖνά ἐστι κἀκεῖνα πάλιν μεταπεσόντα ταῦτα
The same thing is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old; for these, shifted round, are those, and those shifted back again are these.
Preserved by Plutarch (Consolation to Apollonius 106e). Heraclitus lines up three pairs we take to be opposites — alive/dead, awake/asleep, young/old — and calls them 'the same,' because each member shifts into the other; the pairs are one thing seen at different turns.
Heraclitus takes the three pairs that feel most absolutely opposed — alive and dead, awake and asleep, young and old — and says flatly that each pair is 'the same.' He does not mean that dying is no different from living; he means that within one continuous thing the two states are stations that pass into each other. The young thing is the old thing earlier; the waker is the sleeper a moment before; and the living, on his cosmology, is matter on its way to death and back. Identity is not a fixed point but the whole arc across which a thing turns from one condition into its opposite.
The reason is given in the second clause, and it is a piece of quiet machinery: <em>metapesonta</em>, 'having shifted round' — a word from dice and game-pieces, the counter that falls over to show its other face. These, when they fall over, are those; those, falling back, are these. So sameness here is not static identity but reciprocal exchange, the same claim the river makes (B12) and the road up and down (B60): a single thing keeps its unity precisely by continually turning into what it is not. Plutarch, who preserved the line to console a grieving father, understood the comfort in it — death is not an exit from the pattern but one more turn of it.
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