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Heraclitus was born in Ephesus, a town between Miletus and Colophon, on the west coast of Ionia (today's Turkey), a generation after the first great three Milesian philosophers (Anaximenes, the youngest of the three, was already an old man). A descendent from earlier kings of Ephesus, Heraclitus was a rich nobleman who gave up any pretense to the throne and all family privileges to his brother so that he could pursue philosophy. Where as Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes were by and large in consort with the societies that made them figures of authority and in which they lived more or less as priests, Heraclitus by all accounts was one of the first of a long tradition of philosophers, culminating in the character of Socrates and deeply influential to the present day, who was deeply critical of his fellow citizens, including other philosophers, even of humanity in general. There has rarely in history been a more explicit and eloquent expression of this sentiment than the one Heraclitus makes of his fellow Ephesians when, in a foreshadowing of the similar fate awaiting the future Socrates, they put one of Heraclitus' teachers, Hermodorus, on trial for corrupting the youth and raising questions in people's minds about the accepted gods:
"The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every adult man, and bequeath their City-State to adolescents."
bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)
