LA MUERTE DE HERÁCLITO. ¿CÓMO CONTAR LA VIDA DE UN PRESOCRÁTICO?

Abstract

In the first chapter of Book IX of his Lives of the philosophers Diogenes Laercio conveys three different stories in relation to the death of Heraclitus of Ephesus. What draws the attention of those stories is that it is possible to establish a relationship between them and elements of the  philosophy of the Ephesian. So the question that this paper seeks to answer is how much truth there is in these stories and how much fiction. How we proceed will provide a translation of the three stories, analyze them and then establish relations with the Heraclitean doctrine above. Once this is done, if we show that the stories are literary creations, arises the question of the value as doxographic source of the work of Diogenes; we try to answer that question too.