Book 9
1.14
For the Greeks as a rule are not prone to mark their wise men; nay, they neglect their excellent precepts which make for good hearing and learning. But at my court there is secured for you every privilege and daily conversation of a good and worthy kind, and a life in keeping with your counsels.
1.14
Heraclitus of Ephesus to King Darius, son of Hystaspes, greeting.
1.14
All men upon earth hold aloof from truth and justice, while, by reason of wicked folly, they devote themselves to avarice and thirst for popularity. But I, being forgetful of all wickedness, shunning the general satiety which is closely joined with envy, and because I have a horror of splendour, could not come to Persia, being content with little, when that little is to my mind.
1.14
So independent was he even when dealing with a king.
1.15
Demetrius, in his book on Men of the Same Name, says that he despised even the Athenians, although held by them in the highest estimation; and, notwithstanding that the Ephesians thought little of him, he preferred his own home the more. Demetrius of Phalerum, too, mentions him in his Defence of SocratesThis work is again quoted in ix. 37 and ix. 57, and is perhaps the source of the first sentence of § 52 also.; and the commentators on his work are very numerous, including as they do Antishenes and Heraclides of Pontus, Cleanthes and Sphaerus the Stoic, and again Pausanias who was called the imitator of Heraclitus, Nicomedes, Dionysius, and, among the grammarians, Diodotus. The latter affirms that it is not a treatise upon nature, but upon government, the physical part serving merely for illustration.Apparently D. L. is using, through another of his sources, the very same citation from Diodotus which he has given verbatim in § 12.
