Among Heraclitus’ dense and richly allusive fragments,Footnote ¹ one significant detail that so far appears to have gone unnoticed by scholars is the relationship between B51, the ‘bow-lyre fragment’, and the Odyssey.

It is unclear precisely what Heraclitus refers to as ‘differing’ and agreeing ‘with itself’, but the image of the ‘backwards-turning fastening’ is an example of a Heraclitean ‘unity of opposites’, the doctrine that ostensibly contrary properties (in this instance, ‘difference’ and ‘agreement’) have an underlying connection:Footnote ³ a bow is a piece of wood which is bent back upon itself and kept bent by the taut string; the ancient λύρα featured two wooden or horn arms that emerge at vertical angles from opposing sides of a box or shell, but turn back towards one another and are joined at the top by a cross-bar.Footnote ⁴ Both instruments thus have opposite ends that are united by being bent back towards one another and physically joined. But, given Heraclitus’ self-consciously riddling style, we are also encouraged to identify further senses of ἁρμονίη, especially since, elsewhere, he states that ‘unapparent ἁρμονίη is better than apparent’ (B54). With this principle in mind, the lyre's ‘backwards-turning joining’ may also refer to the strings turning back upon themselves around the crossbar, whilst that of the bow suggests the manner in which the arrow is joined to the string, but flies in the opposite direction to that in which the string is pulled. In addition to these physical ‘joinings’, the ἁρμονίη of the lyre refers to a musical scale (see LSJ s.v.), which is ‘backwards-turning’ in that it can be played ascendingly or descendingly.Footnote ⁵ Furthermore, the statement may have a metatextual significance: the fragment itself enacts the ‘backwards-turning joining’ it describes, since it conjoins the two opposed images of the musically harmonious lyre and the bow, the death-dealing instrument of warfare.Footnote ⁶ Finally, the conjunction of these two objects also has a further significance: they are the two characteristic instruments of Apollo. Thus, in his Homeric Hymn, Apollo's first words after being born are to request a lyre and a bow (Hymn. Hom. Ap. 131). An Apolline significance is appropriate here, since Apollo is the god who, in Heraclitus B93, ‘neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign’, thereby providing a model for Heraclitus’ own riddling, multilayered style.Footnote ⁷

The most famous Apolline conjunction of the bow and the lyre in Greek literature occurs in Book 21 of the Odyssey, in the climactic scene in which Odysseus strings the bow (21.404–11):

We are primed to regard this association of the bow and the lyre as Apolline by the detail that this event takes place on a feast-day for Apollo (20.276–8; cf. 21.258–9), by Antinous’ demand that they sacrifice goats to him before conducting the contest (21.267–8) and by the fact that it is Apollo who will grant victory (21.338, 21.364–5).Footnote ⁸ Apollo thus oversees the proceedings and Odysseus comes to embody the god by acting as expert in both archery and, figuratively, lyre-playing.Footnote ⁹

The conjunction of bow and lyre, together with the earlier references to Apollo, brings this passage into contact with the Heraclitean fragment. Moreover, Heraclitus’ use of παλίντροπος recalls the epic epithet for the bow, παλίντονος, which explains how the latter arose as an alternative reading in the fragment.Footnote ¹⁰ παλίντονος is used twice of Odysseus’ bow (Od. 21.11, 21.59) and nowhere else in the Odyssey. These features, I propose, mark a connection between the Heraclitean and Homeric passages. One might object that the connection is merely a generic one: both passages make use of the same topos, the typical association of Apollo with the bow and the lyre, so that Heraclitus need not have drawn specifically on the Homeric passage. But this was one of the most famous scenes in the Odyssey,Footnote ¹¹ and one which would have been particularly memorable in rhapsodic performance, since it unites the figures of hero, poet and performer, collapsing the distinction between the two worlds of the poem and the audience at the climax of the narrative.Footnote ¹² It is therefore highly plausible that Heraclitus—who knew the Homeric poems as performed rhapsodically (cf. B42 quoted below)—had the passage in mind when composing the fragment, and undoubtable that many of his readers or listeners could have drawn the comparison.Footnote ¹³ The fact that some of the shared features are generic does not rule out the possibility that this is a specific allusion.Footnote ¹⁴

The relationship is also meaningful. The simile, when read through the lens of the Heraclitean fragment, appears as a ‘unity of opposites’. As Thalmann writes of the Odyssey passage, ‘Song and battle should properly be kept distinct. Their mixture characterizes the ensuing action as well. Song typically accompanies the meal; but now while the suitors eat, the bow will replace the phorminx.’Footnote ¹⁵ Recollection of the Odyssean scene thus illustrates Heraclitus’ doctrine that a unity underlies such ostensibly conflicting oppositions, but this unity, like Odysseus’ stringing of the bow, results in ‘war’, hence, for Heraclitus, ‘war is father of all and king of all’ (B53; cf. B80).Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, the emphasis of the Homeric passage falls upon Odysseus’ expertise: he picks up and looks at the bow like someone who knows what he is doing (ἐπιστάμενος). Before he has strung the bow, he has handled it this way and that, checking that it has not been eaten by worms (Od. 21.393–5), so that the onlookers comment on his knowledge (21.397–400). This contrasts with the suitors who have singularly failed to string the bow (21.144–255), even after warming it up (21.184, 21.245–6). Their lack of understanding is manifest in Antinous’ mistaken explanation for their failure, that it is because it is a holy feast-day (21.257–9). In not knowing how to put the bow together, they are like Heraclitus’ masses who do not ‘understand’—or, more literally, ‘put together’ (ξυνιᾶσιν)—the backwards-turning fastening of the bow or the lyre. Heraclitus thus casts the ignorant masses as the Odyssean suitors. Heraclitus himself, in understanding how this ἁρμονίη works, may be valorized as the heroic Odysseus.

More speculatively, a further piece of ancient evidence evinces a connection between Heraclitus, Odysseus and the word παλίντροπος: Sophocles’ Philoctetes.Footnote ¹⁷ Recently, Simon Goldhill has argued that Odysseus’ use of the term in the tragedy responds to the Homeric Odysseus’ epithet, πολύτροπος. ‘The programmatic use of polutropos in Homer announces the return of Odysseus from his wanderings thanks to his powers of guile. The use of palintropos here [sc. Soph. Phil. 1222–3], the re-writing of polutropos, signals the failure of Odysseus’ guile and a new crisis in the narrative of return.’Footnote ¹⁸ Goldhill also entertains the possibility that Sophocles’ use of the adjective was influenced by Heraclitus B51.Footnote ¹⁹ If Goldhill's reading is accepted, it lends further support to the possibility that Heraclitus alludes to the Odyssey in B51: the Heraclitean fragment could have provided Sophocles with a precedent for the combination of Odysseus with the term παλίντροπος.

Now, it could be objected that Heraclitus would not allude in this manner to a poet whom he elsewhere criticizes (B42) and lampoons (B56). But the appropriation of a motif need not be taken as a sign of admiration. The criticism of Homer in B42 has itself been seen to appropriate Homeric language:

The verb ῥαπίζεσθαι plays upon the traditional etymology of ῥαψῳδός—instead of performing their work as rhapsodes with sticks, Homer and Archilochus should be beaten with them—but Graziosi has argued that there is also a wordplay on the verb ἐκβάλλεσθαι: it evokes ἀναβάλλεσθαι in the characteristically epic sense of ‘to strike up a song’ (see LSJ s.v. ἀναβάλλω B.I.; for example Od. 1.155, 8.266). Thus, she writes, ‘Heraclitus’ statement could then be paraphrased as “strike them out, do not let them strike up the song!”’.Footnote ²⁰ We could read B51 as similarly turning a Homeric image against Homer: on the basis of B42 and especially of B56 (which depicts the poet as failing to understand riddles), we can assume that Homer is one of the masses who do not understand ‘how in differing it agrees with itself’. He therefore does not understand an image he himself uses, of the collocation of the bow and the lyre. Indeed, the rhapsode who is beaten with his own staff seems a suitable metaphor for this form of critical literary appropriation.

The fact that such an ‘allusion’ can be read in this meaningful manner renders plausible the hypothesis that Heraclitus intended it and expected it to be identified by at least some of his readers.Footnote ²¹ This conclusion, if accepted, enhances our understanding both of Heraclitus’ artistry and of the reception of the Odyssey during this period. Heraclitus B51 could be added to the list of sixth-century texts that allude to what would become well-known episodes in the Homeric epics, increasing the likelihood that the latter had attained a broad level of textual fixity at this stage.Footnote ²² It could also affect our interpretation of the relationship between Parmenides and Heraclitus. Parmenides B6.9 has often been seen as a critical allusion to Heraclitus B51.Footnote ²³ Additionally, Parmenides’ poem as a whole has long been seen to engage with the Odyssey.Footnote ²⁴ We might then read Parmenides B6.9 as a ‘window’ or ‘two-tier’ allusion to both Heraclitus and the Odyssey:Footnote ²⁵ Heraclitus appropriates a Homeric image to criticize Homer, casting ignorant mortals (including Homer) as the foolish suitors; Parmenides appropriates both Heraclitean and Homeric imagery, casting Heraclitus as one of the ignorant masses whilst presenting his primary narrator as an Odysseus-like figure.

But even if the hypothesis of an intentional allusion fails to convince, there is an important intertextual connection between the two passages that affects our understanding of Heraclitus’ use of this topos. The Odyssean passage more fully develops the contrast between discordant violence and harmony that is implicit in the Apolline juxtaposition of bow and lyre; it also provides a more vivid image of the specialist expertise involved in mastering both instruments, in contrast with ignorant masses. These themes are only latent in Heraclitus’ succinct fragment, but the Odyssean passage suggests that the use of this topos connoted such jarring paradoxes. As Hinds writes, using a Heraclitean topos himself, ‘[w]ith topoi, and indeed with allusive discourse at large, one can never step into the same river twice’:Footnote ²⁶ a reader can never truly ‘step into the same river’ as the author and see exactly the same connotations in a particular topos (or allusion), but an exploration of its potential range of significance is nevertheless enriching.