I try to start each morning with some Attic exercises. This morning when I concluded my exercises I dared to pick up T.M. Robinson's critical edition of Heraclitus' fragments, which obviously includes the fragments in the 'original' Attic Greek form. 'Original' is a relative term in this context because what we today identify as 'ancient Greek' is something that was codified by the medieval Erasmus. Moreover, with Heraclitus we have the additional challenge of only knowing his writings through the writings of others who came later, most importantly Aristotle, but also Plato, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes et al.
I wanted to test my current knowledge of Attic so I had a go at a few fragments, fumbling may way through a few until I arrived at fragment 10, which is taken from Aristotle's De Mundo 5.396b20
Robinson's translation: "Things grasped together: things whole, things not whole; <some-thing> being brought together, <something> being separated; <something> consonant, <something> dissonant. Out of all things <comes?> one thing, and out of one thing all things."
ἐκ πἀντω ἐν και ἐξ ἐωος πἀντα
The fragment turns the relationship between ἐν and πἀντα, the one and the many, which is how we have inherited the 'problem'.
ἐκ πἀντω can be read as 'out of the many' or 'from the many', but πἀντω (the many, or things) is in the dative case, which means that implies 'to' or 'for'. But ἐκ is the preposition for the genitive case: 'out of, from'. I'm sure my elementary understanding of Attic has is causing me to miss the target, but that is balanced by the three decades of reading philosophy, much of it Attic. What's more, this is Heraclitus we are reading! So it's very possible that he is combining to grammatical cases, and, indeed, has to do that in order to convey the dynamic [dialectical] force the discloses the relationship between Being and Becoming: pulling apart/coming together, consonance/dissonance; things grasped together/let-be in difference:
What follows is that we have to think the dative ('to' or 'toward') with the genitive 'out of, from': ἐν (whole, one) is 'out of the many' or 'from the many' ἐκ πἀντω; ἐκ πἀντω is 'to' or 'for' ἐν. And this reveals the following Sentence:
1. Thinking, occurring in media res: grasping together, letting-be apart.
This is a preliminary gathering of excerpts from the 2.0 commentaries that take up τα παντα. Not surprising, two of those happen in the peak month of October, and on consecutive days:
OPM 239(40), October 11th
(2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and
Learning, pp. 235-236
OPM 240(41), October 12th
(2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and
Learning, pp. 236-237
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