The otherwise unknown Hermodorus may not even be his contemporary, as is usually assumed, but rather an exemplary citizen from an earlier generation. Heraclitus certainly refers elsewhere to his intellectual and artistic predecessors: Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, and Thales, all of whom died before Heraclitus was born; Bias and Pythagoras, who could have been his older contemporaries; and Hecataeus and Xenophanes, who were almost certainly contemporaries. Why would he not also refer to an Ephesian known long after his death for his political activity"
Some suppositions about Heraclitus's life can be reasonably made, however. Because Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic, was said to be his teacher, it can be guessed that Heraclitus was active around 500 B.C. Indeed, the later author Olympiodorus dates the period he which he flourished to the sixty-ninth Olympiad (504-501 B.C.), although how much earlier and later he was also active cannot be said with certainty. But the fact that Heraclitus does not criticize or, indeed, even allude to Parmenides, who began to write in the early fifth century, suggests that Heraclitus was not active long after the beginning of the century.
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