Snippet #4: Sleep and Death

Hypnos (the small winged figure) sits on top of the sleeping giant Alkyoneus in the border of a Greek vase painted c. 470-430 BCE. Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.

I’m getting ready to release my translation of the Orphic Hymn of Hypnos (Sleep) in the next few days, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about ancient ideas of sleep — including it’s often-remarked relationship to death.

This snippet (unedited off-the-cuff thoughts I make on different topics) comes to you courtesy of the pre-Platonic philosopher Heraclitus. We have Heraclitus’ works in fragments—meaning that we only know of him through quotations from other, later writers. Heraclitus’s fragments contain several intriguing comments about the nature of sleeping, waking, and death, and a whole book could be written about the relationship of his thought to the earliest Orphic teachings.

The one fragment I refer to in this snippet is number B26, and is my own translation. Heraclitus is notoriously difficult to translate, and my own translation agrees with some of the scholarly translations out there, but not the one you will find on Wikipedia (which I don’t disagree with per se, but isn’t in my humble opinion the best possible word choice).

If you’d like to read the original Greek, you can find it on page 30 of this edition and translation by Prof. William Harris.