Heraclitus was a great prose artist, one of the most powerful stylists not only of Greek antiquity but of world literature. He was also a major thinker, perhaps the only pre-Socratic philosopher whose thought is of more than historical interest today. His reflections upon the order of nature and man's place within it, upon the problems of language, meaning and communication still seem profound; and many of his insights will remain illuminating for the modern reader, not merely for the specialist in ancient thought.

The aim of the present work is to demonstrate the truth of these claims by making Heraclitus accessible to contemporary readers as a philosopher of the first rank. With this in mind I have tried to rearrange the fragments in a meaningful order, to give a translation that reflects as far as possible the linguistic richness of the original, and to provide a commentary designed to make explicit the wealth of meaning that cannot be directly conveyed in a translation but is latent in Heraclitus' own words, in his tantalizing and suggestive form of enigmatic utterance.

The Greek text is given here together with the translation, since any interpretation is obliged to make continual reference to the original wording. And I think it should be possible to read the fragments in a meaningful order, even if one reads them in Greek. No attempt has been made to produce a new critical edition, and I have generally followed the text of Marcovich where he diverges from Diels. But in some nine cases my text differs from both Diels and Marcovich in such a way that the interpretation of the fragment is altered, sometimes radically (see p. 26).