HEIDEL. — ON FRAGMENTS OF TIIE PRE-SOCRATICS. 725 



translates "how can any real tliin«; have had its order changed?" 

 I do not believe this rendering, which agrees with that of Mullach, is 

 possible, for I know of no such jjeriphrastic form as ij.eTaKoafj.riOeu tit] 

 {a-Kapvrfiels, Plato, Soph. 217 C, is aor. pass, in form only); that of 

 Diels, on the other hand, thongh clearly necessary if one adopts his 

 text, does not yield the thonglit required in tlu; context. I incline to 

 think that tl and 17 are marginal corrections which have been misread 

 iind misplaced, and that we should read ttcos av ixiTaKoatxrfidr} tl Tibv 

 ioPTOiu; " IIoiv should anything real sufcr change of order?" 



V^ 149, 1. Fr. 9, et iJ.h ovv eirj, 8e2 avro eu eluaL' eu 8^ ov avTO 

 acO;ua nrj ex^<-v. el 8e exoi Trdxos, exot au fxapta, nai ovKen, ev el'r?. 



Although Simplicius twice so quotes Melissus, and we cannot 

 therefore doubt that his text so read, I cannot believe that Alelissus 

 wrote crcoyua ijltj ex^iv. That the Neo-Platonists understood him as 

 holding that the existent is incorporeal is of course well known, but 

 is insufficient warrant for attributing the doctrine to him. Zeller 

 and Burnet seek to obviate the difficulty by referring the fragment, 

 not to the Eleatic One, but to the Pythagorean Unit. Against this 

 view there are two objections which appear to me to be fatal to it: 

 first, we should huve to suppose that Simplicius, who read this passage 

 in its context, did not grasp its import, which must have been fairly 

 clear; second, even if Simplicius should have erred in this respect, 

 the argument of jMelissus must have been a])plicable to the Eleatic 

 One, and so Simplicius would be substantially right in quoting the 

 words in order to pro\e that the Eleatic One was incorporeal. This 

 very conception of Eleatic doctrine, however, would sufficiently 

 account for a corruption of the text, such as reading ex^tv for elvac. 

 That is what I conceive to have occurred. Melissus, understanding 

 <T0Jfxa as an adpoiafxa of parts which, because divisible ad infinitum, 

 must be tridimensional or "have thickness," says that a true Unit 

 (whether Eleatic or Pythagorean) cannot be conceived as a aw/xa or 

 c.dpoi(jna. See Amer. Journ. of Philol., Vol. 28, p. 79. At the begin- 

 ning of the same clause the MS. tradition clearly points to the read- 

 ing tu 5' kbv rather than tv 8e bv. This correction, which I had noted 

 several years ago, has now been made b}' Diels in V^. 



c. 21. Empedocles. 



V^ 203, 13 sq. Arist. De Anima 1. 2. 404'' 8 sq., asserts that Em- 

 pedocles regarded the soul (}pvxr]) as compounded of all the elements, 



