Background

IONIAN PHILOSOPHY
We know little of Heracleitus' family background other than that it was aristocratic and that he was from the Ionian town of Ephesos. This was a good place to be born if you wanted to be a philosopher at the time. Ionia was where all the great thinkers either came from or went to during the sixth century BC before Athens on mainland Greece tried to claim a monopoly on right thinking. Here East met West and Greek culture came into contact with ancient cultures that had thousands of years of unbroken civilization, dominated by temple priests. This was where Greek philosophy was born, not on the Greek Peninsula.

Heracleitus spurned his fellow citizens as ignorant, preferring the company of children, and refusing to participate in political life. They, in turn, described him as Heracleitus the Obscure, the Riddler.