Back to Heraclitus, and Hesiod

Remember that the philosopher Heraclitus created the word polymathy. He said, “Much learning (i.e., polymathy) does not teach understanding. For it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus.”

What did he mean by that? And who were those guys?

As I wrote in the PopMatters article, we don’t know anymore what Heraclitus’s actual definition of polymathy was, but knowing who those other guys were might help us figure out what he meant by polymathy.

Hesiod was a great early Greek poet. In fact, he was considered the second great early poet, after Homer. Hesiod lived around 700 B.C.E., and his most famous works (that we know about) are Theogony and Works and Days. Poets were very important people in those days. The early Greeks considered them to be the authoritative source of history, the gods, astronomy, farming, and other useful information. They were considered to be fountains of wisdom. Thus, Heraclitus, like most or all of the other Greeks in his era, presumably thought of Hesiod as knowing everything (or almost everything). So Hesiod represents perhaps the classic definition of polymathy, knowing many subjects.

More on the others later.