Encyclopedia of Philosophy: HERACLITUS

The last, and the most famous, of these early Ionian philosophers was Heraclitus, who lived early in the fifth century in the great metropolis of Ephesus, where later St Paul was to preach, dwell, and be persecuted. The city, in Heraclitus’ day as in St Paul’s, was dominated by the great temple of the fertility goddess Artemis. Heraclitus denounced the worship of the temple: praying to statues was like whispering gossip to an empty house, and offering sacrifices to purify oneself    from sin was like trying to wash off mud with mud. He visited the temple from time to time, but only to play dice with the children there – much better com¬pany than statesmen, he said, refusing to take any part in the city’s politics. In Artemis’ temple, too, he deposited his three-book treatise on philosophy and politics, a work, now lost, of notorious difficulty, so puzzling that some thought it a text of physics, others a political tract. (‘What I understand of it is excellent,’ Socrates said later, ‘what I don’t understand may well be excellent also; but only a deep-sea diver could get to the bottom of it.’)