Heraclitus' Fire and the Early Stoics

The Stoic reception of Heraclitus is the subject of two contributions which focus on different topics. Michele Alessandrelli (Heraclitus’ Fire and the Early Stoics) deals with the Stoic reception of the Heraclitean conception of fire. He suggests that the Stoics read various sayings that belonged (or were believed to belong) to the cosmological part of Heraclitus’ book and shows the fundamental role that some sayings dealing with fire (esp. 22 B 30 and 31 DK) played in the Stoic development of the basic principles of cosmogony. He also shows that the Stoic appropriation of the Heraclitean concept of fire consisted in a hermeneutic activity focused on a particular cluster of sayings. More specifically, the author argues that the distinction between the cosmos as god and the cosmos as world-order (διακόσμησις) is the result of an assimilation of B 30. The doctrine of conflagration is attributed by the Stoics to Heraclitus, also thanks to the doxographical mediation of Aristotle and Theophrastus. This doctrine went into crisis in the later phase of Hellenistic Stoicism. Alessandrelli hypothesises that a minority faction of Stoics proposed a non-conflagrationist interpretation of Heraclitus. He argues that one possible source of this alternative interpretation was the Hippocratic On Regimen.