HEIDEL.-— ON FR.\GMENTS OF THE PRE-SOCRATICS. 711 



eW "Ilpas VTTo 

 nkvTpoLs banaadtU tirt rod XP^<^^ jikra. 



He replied that the anastrophe of yuera was impossible in prose. 

 This is of course true, as I well knew, assuniinfi; that we are dealing 

 with real prose. At that time, having nothing more definite than the 

 vague impression that the diction and movement of certain fragments 

 of Heraditus were distinctly poetic, and the statement in the Vita of 

 Suidas, \\hich I then interpreted as referring in a general Avay to 

 poetic diction, I dropped the matter, though I still felt that XP^'^^ iiera 

 was proI)aI)ly the true reading. Recently Dr. Bruno Jordan, Archiv 

 fiir Gesch. der Philos., 24 (1911), p. 480, has independently made the 

 same suggestion. In view of the probability that in this 'fragment,' 

 as in fr. 78, we have a versified version of Heraditus reconverted into 

 prose, I regard my emendation as all but certain. I do not think it 

 feasible to recover the verse original throughout, because, as I indi- 

 cated above, koI yivbixtva iravra Kar' tptv appears to be a summarizing 

 formula; but it is easy to pick out parts of the sentence which fall 

 almost without change into iambic verse: 



dbkvat 5e XP'7 



Tov iroXe/jLov ovra ^vvov 



Kal dUrju epiu 



<Ctov> xP^<^^ /xera. 



It must be said that the text of the fragment is not absolutely certain, 

 as the Mss. of Origen ^if/must Cclsus read ei oe XPV and SlKriu eptlu; 

 but the emendations adopted by Diels and reproduced abo\e are so 

 obvious that we may with confidence make his text the basis of our 

 study. Regarded in the light of the poetic tags which have just been 

 noted, we have again a close parallel to the prose paraphrase of 

 Scythinus, fr. 2; but I hazard no guess as to the author of the versi- 

 fied version. 



V 76, 12. Fr. 100, cjpas at iravra cfikpovGL. 



This fragment is preserved by Plutarch, who again alludes to it. 

 The movement is "clearly dactylic, and one may suspect that it formed 

 part of an hexameter, though its brevity forbids dogmatic conclusions. 

 In view of the experiments of Cleanthes it is not improI)able that there 

 were versions of certain Heraclitean sayings in heroic verse. It is, of 

 course, possible that this fragment owes its rhythmical or metrical 

 form to chance or to unconscious poetical influences not unnatural 



