The second difficulty which we have to face is even more serious. Most of the commentators on Herakleitos mentioned in Diogenes were Stoics,[369] and it is certain that their paraphrases were sometimes taken for the original. Now, the Stoics held the Ephesian in peculiar veneration, and sought to interpret him as far as possible in accordance with their own system. Further, they were fond of “accommodating”[370] the views of earlier thinkers to their own, and this has had serious consequences. In particular, the Stoic theories of the λόγος and the ἐκπύρωσις are constantly ascribed to Herakleitos by our authorities, and the very fragments are adulterated with scraps of Stoic terminology. Footnote 369: Diog. ix. 15 (R. P. 30 c). Schleiermacher rightly insisted upon this. Footnote 370: The word συνοικειοῦν is used of the Stoic method of interpretation by Philodemos (cf. _Dox._ 547 b, n.), and Cicero (_N.D._ i. 41) renders it by _accommodare_. Chrysippos in particular gave a great impulse to this sort of thing, as we may best learn from Galen, _de Plac. Hippocr. et Plat._ Book iii. Good examples are Aet. i. 13, 2; 28, 1; iv. 3, 12,—where distinctively Stoic doctrines are ascribed to Herakleitos. What the Stoics were capable of, we see from Kleanthes, fr. 55, Pearson. He proposed to read Ζεῦ ἀναδωδωναῖε in _Il._ xvi. 233, ὡς τὸν ἐκ τῆς γῆς ἀναθυμιώμενον ἀέρα διὰ τὴν ἀνάδοσιν Ἀναδωδωναῖον ὄντα. [Sidenote: The discovery of Herakleitos.] 67. Herakleitos looks down not only on the mass of men, but on all previous inquirers into nature. This must mean that he believed himself to have attained insight into some truth which had not hitherto been recognised, though it was, as it were, staring men in the face (fr. 93). Clearly, then, if we wish to get at the central thing in his teaching, we must try to find out what he was thinking of when he launched into those denunciations of human dulness and ignorance.[371] The answer seems to be given in two fragments, 18 and 45. From them we gather that the truth hitherto ignored is that the many apparently independent and conflicting things we know are really one, and that, on the other hand, this one is also many. The “strife of opposites” is really an “attunement” (ἁρμονία). From this it follows that wisdom is not a knowledge of many things, but the perception of the underlying unity of the warring opposites. That this really was the fundamental thought of Herakleitos is stated by Philo. He says: “For that which is made up of both the opposites is one; and, when the one is divided, the opposites are disclosed. Is not this just what the Greeks say their great and much belauded Herakleitos put in the forefront of his philosophy as summing it all up, and boasted of as a new discovery?”[372] We shall take the elements of this theory one by one, and see how they are to be understood. Footnote 371: