of Ephesus, the "Weeping Philosopher," as he was called from his gloomy and sombre views of life, may be identified with the Ionian philosophy, though he held many of his tenets independently of it. His era has been much disputed. According to Fynes Clinton, his floruit may be assigned about B.C. 513. His father was one of the leading citizens of Ephesus, with means ample enough to send the future philosopher abroad to enlarge his mind by foreign travel. His name is variously given as Blyson, Bionor, or Banson. On his return home Heraclitus was offered the chief-magistracy of Ephesus, but he waived the honour in favour of a younger brother. He had little sympathy with the character of his fellow-townsmen, and used to play at dice with little children in the streets near the great temple of Diana, saying that he would rather throw away his time on this trivolums sport than undertake the task of governing such wretches as the Ephesians. He is said to have begun the study of philosophy under the Pythagorean Hippasus of Metapontum; others say, of the Eleatic Xenophanes, but he claimed for himself, and on good grounds, the merit of being entirely self-taught. His unsocial and caustic humour remained with him to the last, and even grew in bitterness with his advancing years. To such an extreme did he carry it, that he at length retired to the mountains and refused all further intercourse with his kind. Limiting his diet to vegetables, he soon brought on a mortal disease, which compelled him to return home. But he only came back to die. At the time of his death he is said to have reached his sixtieth year. It is not necessary to repeat the silly stories about the manner of his death.

The philosophy of Heraclitus was embodied in a prose work entitled Ἐπικρατεῖ τὸ φύσις (On Nature). The style of this work was so obscure that it gained him the title of oxymoron, which, however, may have a reference to the gloomy tenor of his general views. It must also be borne in mind that at the time Heraclitus wrote there was no good prose philosophical style in existence. Verse had, till about his time, been the favourite vehicle of thought, and it was not to be looked for that the earliest prose-writers should make the leap all at once from a poetical to a purely scientific way of regarding common things. The language of Heraclitus, accordingly, had a strange and mysterious import, which he himself happily compared to the utterances of the sibyl. The object of all philosophy, according to him, is to discover the vital principle that inheres in all the phenomena of nature. This principle he held to be fire; not the fire of domestic life, but a kind of hot and elastic fluid "self-kindled and self-extinguished," which, subtlety permeating everything, develops and moulds it according to fixed laws into various forms. In one of its modifications this fluid, as the soul or principle of life, is endowed with intelligence and powers of ceaseless activity. In this way everything that exists is merely seen at the moment; it is undergoing a change, and consequently exists, and does not exist at the same moment. It is this ceaseless activity that creates in the subjects of its action a constant tendency to want on the one side and satiety on the other. These forces meeting in certain degrees of intensity, produce the phenomena of life and death. For a final cause of all the changes going on in nature, Heraclitus appeals to destiny. With him, whatever is, is right; and in his moral system he laid down as the highest good, a perfect acquiescence in the decrees of that overruling destiny—a sort of philosophic fatalism, which was afterwards worked out under a different form by the Stoics, and again appears in a different guise in the Hegelian philosophy.

The philosophy of Heraclitus has been constructed out of fragments of his works preserved in Plutarch, Clemens of Alexandria, and Sextus Empiricus. These fragments were collected by Henry Stephens, and published by him along with some others, under the title of Pois Philosophe, Paris, 1573. A detailed analysis of his doctrines is given by Brandis and by Ritter in their respective histories of ancient philosophy.