Because today was part of a long weekend in Naples—yesterday was the feast of San Gennaro, the city's patron, known among other things for the miracle (officially speaking, "just" a prodigy, per the Church) of the liquification of his reliquary blood, which I witnessed in the cathedral—the school building shut a bit earlier than usual. So, on my way home along Spaccanapoli, I stopped and got a gelato. Since the side gate to Santa Chiara, where I usually enjoy my gelato, was closed, I continued on to Piazza del Gesù, where a small crowd was gathered round for some minor television personality talking with passers-by on camera. I eavesdropped in hopes of overhearing who exactly it was while I ate my foresta and fiordilatte, without real success (overhearing, that is; eating was a great success). When that got old I turned and headed for the little bookshop in the corner of the piazza, Dante & Descartes, to browse the offerings and say hi to Giancarlo the libraio. I picked up Louise Glück's Averno and the first of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale—I read them all some time ago in English, but I've been meaning to read them in Italian, especially now that I've been living in Naples for a few years.
Giancarlo mentioned that shortly there'd be a book presentation, a sort of epistolary novel of dialogue between two women in Venice, so I decided to stick around. It was a fun discussion between the two interlocutors and the author, which convinced me to add another book to my stack (Bruceremo by Caterina Serra). The book's epigraph is attributed to Heraclitus:
Il più bello dei mondi non è che un mucchio di rifiuti gettati a caso ("The most beautiful of worlds is nothing but a randomly tossed heap of trash")
Not remembering this particular Heraclitean fragment, and curious about its potentially archaeological reception, I looked it up, Diels 124. Diels' Greek text reads σάρμα εἰκῆ κεχυμένον. Σάρμα is a very rare word, attested in the fragmentary comic poet Rhinthon and, possibly, in this fragment of Heraclitus; the noun derived from the verb σαίρω "to sweep, clean," hence σάρμα would be "sweepings": "sweepings piled up (κεχυμένον) at random (εἰκῆ)."
The textual tradition, however, is messier than this. Like the rest of the so-called Pre-Socratics, we don't have any complete surviving text of Heraclitus. This particular fragment is found in Theophrastus' \so-called Metaphysics, and the manuscript tradition transmits σὰρξ εἰκῇ κεχυμένων, which is seemingly grammatically problematic in a few ways and so has been subject to various emendations, among them Diels's σάρμα... κεχυμένον. Similar is the conjecture σάρον, another noun related to σαίρω meaning "sweepings, rubbish" but rather better attested than σάρμα. Another option is that of Most, followed by few, σωρῶν εἰκῇ κεχυμένων positing a form of σωρός "heap": "just like the most beautiful of the heaps piled at random [is] the world-order."
But the manuscripts of Theophrastus transmit σὰρξ: flesh.
"Σὰρξ is universally attested: all the Greek manuscripts and the Arabic (Ψ) and Latin (Λ) translations have it, so that if it is indeed erroneous it would be one of the primitive errors of the Neoplatonic archetype manuscript. With few exceptions, all scholars have thought it untenable and emended it, mostly with a word that means “a heap or a pile [of sweepings]... However, what is untenable is this emendation, because it presents the wrong comparison and ruins the point that Theophrastus is trying to make" (Gutas, p. 328).
"Flesh" though art, and unto "flesh" thou shalt return...
Gutas's streamlined version of this passage of Theophrastus, taking into account the various traditions: "for example, Heraclitus should have realized the absurdity of his own statement when he said that the human body, made up of elements “poured out at random” (i.e., by random and indeterminate first principles), is nevertheless the most beautiful arrangement of such elements." (You will have to go read Gutas's extensive commentary for translating κόσμος as "arrangement" rather than "world" or "universe.")
Another perfectly good, evocative, slightly mysterious pre-Socratic aphorism ruined by philology...
(As usual, there's more that I intended to say here, but the night is getting away from me, and I already don't know where I got the energy to write this all in the first place. And the role that the pre-Socratics play for the non-specialist—and I mean the non-specialist in the pre-Socratics—as a sort of mystical mists of mystery will have to wait for a future post.)
Gutas, Dimitri, ed. 2010. Theophrastus On First Principles: (known as his Metaphysics) : Greek Text and Medieval Arabic Translation. Philosophia Antiqua. Leiden: Brill.
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