Customer Reviews

Heraclitus: Fragments (Phoenix Supplementary Volumes)

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The Phoenix Pre-Socratics is a good book series, but I wasn't too impressed by this offering. Inwood's The Poem of Empedocles: A text and translation with a commentary (Phoenix Supplementary Volume) was a strong and substantial book, and Gallop's slim Parmenides of Elea: A text and translation with an introduction (Phoenix Supplementary Volume), despite its diminutive size, came with a fairly insightful commentary at the beginning.

T.M. Robinson's book on Heraclitus has its virtues. The translation is good. It often offers the original context in which a Heraclitean fragment was quoted by the ancient source. It is a handy, compact, quick reference to the fragments for the student or scholar who doesn't want to dig around in Charles Kahn's maze with only a jumble of Roman numerals to light the way (The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary), and thus makes a good compliment to that or another edition of Heraclitus.

But the commentary is uninspired and anemic. I should note that Robinson is never foolish or careless--he is clearly competent. But his commentary is unremarkable and all too often fails to arrive at any real conclusions about Heraclitus' meaning. In fact, it pretty much seems cobbled together from the work of a few other scholars and the result is a fairly bland, fairly inconclusive series of notes on Heraclitus.

Thus, I highly recommend the book as an edition and translation of Heraclitus, but not as a general introduction to his writings. It makes an excellent companion to other works, and offers a few interesting bibliographical pointer, but that's about it.

In this text of the fragments there is not a single mention of the Bywater edition or of the excellent edition, now out of print,which includes the Bywater with a translation and commentary by Patrick ? --sorry, forgot the last name; but this edition can be borrowed from major academic libraries. What's the deal?