Texts & Licences

About the reader

The aim is to bring the whole Presocratic corpus within reach: original texts, published translations and clear references to their sources.

English is the main language of the reader. Many researchers also read German, French, Italian or Spanish, and a translation in one of these languages can make a fragment accessible when English is unavailable. Where more than one translation is included, you can choose which to read.

The present edition draws from the B fragments in Diels–Kranz and the unlettered texts of chapters 89–90. Each included entry has a translation published before 1950 whose source and reuse status have been checked. A testimonia and C imitations are not yet included. The coverage page lists the current contents and omitted references by author. Further historical sources may fill these gaps, as may new translations prepared for the project, with named translators and editorial review.

Two ways to read

Reading collection is the main reader. It gathers the included fragments under their DK references, using several historical editions of the original texts and translations. The source of each passage is given beside it.

Diels 1922 is a smaller selection of translated source passages from that edition. It preserves the edition’s wording, quotation boundaries and numbering. These passages overlap the main collection; they are not additional fragments, and this is not the complete 1922 edition. Its fragment numbers should not be assumed to match the later DK references.

A witness is an ancient passage that preserves or quotes a Presocratic text, sometimes with surrounding discussion. The year 1922 identifies the edition of the original text, not the date of every translation. In either collection, the translator and edition are credited beside the passage.

Original texts

Each passage identifies its edition or transcription. The notes explain differences in wording, quotation boundaries and questions of authorship or transmission.

Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker

The reader uses the historical editions of 1903, 1906, 1912 and 1922, as specified beside each passage. Forage supplies a transcription of the 1903 edition; Open Greek and Latin / First1KGreek, revision 03776b3, supplies the 1922 witnesses. These digital contributions are used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Other passages have been transcribed from the cited historical scans. Forage’s English is not used.

Authors and collections that preserve the fragments

Some fragments are taken from historical editions of the works that quote them. The passage notes identify these editions and retain their readings and reconstructions, which may differ from those in later critical editions.

Other digital editions

Transcriptions from the Perseus Digital Library, the Center for Hellenic Studies, and Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum retain their stated credits and licences. The relevant passages identify the historical edition and digital source.

Historical dictionary notes

Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, American edition edited by Henry Drisler (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889). Where a note cites a dictionary sense, it is distinguished from a translation of the fragment. Edition record ↗

Published translations

Each translation is credited to its translator and edition. English is shown first where available, followed by German, French, Italian and Spanish. Entries without a translation suitable for inclusion are listed in the gap register.

John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy (1908; 1920 where specified) and Arthur Fairbanks’s The First Philosophers of Greece (1898) supply much of the English text. The other translators are listed below and credited beside their passages. Diels’s German selections come from his 1906 and 1922 editions, not later Kranz revisions.

For Parmenides, Burnet is the default English translation for B1–17 and B19. B18 survives in Latin and uses Fairbanks, since Burnet omitted it. Supplementary entries name their own sources.

The pre-1950 cutoff is an editorial choice, not a rule of copyright law. Each translation has been reviewed separately for reuse. Later translations are outside this edition, even where permission is available.

Translation register

The register links each translation to its source and to the fragments where it appears. More than one reference may point to the same passage, and an entry may offer several languages.

Download the source register · 1,344 translation options

The Greek dictionary

Tap a Greek word to open selected senses from A Greek–English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, revised and augmented by Henry Stuart Jones with Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). These are excerpts from the published dictionary; the link beside each headword opens its full LSJ entry.

The digital text is provided by the Perseus Digital Library, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, under CC BY-SA 4.0. This reader selects short senses, converts the source’s Greek encoding to Unicode, and links the entries to words in the reading collection. The resulting dictionary selection retains that licence. Original availability statement and licence · Reading vocabulary and provenance · Full headword index.

Inflected forms are matched using analyses prepared with Morpheus, under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. A form may have several possible headwords; the reader shows these without deciding which fits the passage. Accent-insensitive matches are labelled. Some names, rare forms and damaged readings are not recognised. Words in the reading collection have prepared inflection matches. The lookup box also searches the wider LSJ headword index, loading entries as needed. Some words appear inside larger articles and are not separately indexed; a full-entry link gives the complete source article. Enter the first few letters of a headword to see suggestions when there is no exact match.

Lookups run in your browser. Words are not sent to an external dictionary service. Dictionary files are served by this site and searched locally. Following a full-entry link opens the source website.

Find a saying

Find a saying compares an English description with passages from the included English translations. Results reproduce the published wording and identify the translator and edition. A possible match is a suggestion to inspect; passages below the search threshold are not shown.

The search uses all-MiniLM-L6-v2, with the Xenova ONNX conversion, under the Apache License 2.0. Its model files are hosted with this site. Model licence · Model provenance.

The browser implementation uses Transformers.js 3.8.1 under the Apache License 2.0 and ONNX Runtime Web under the MIT licence. The bundled tokenizer template support uses Hugging Face Jinja, also under MIT. Third-party notices.

The model is downloaded when you first use this search. Matching then runs in this browser; your description is not sent to a search service. Ordinary reading and text search do not need the model.

References and editorial scope

DK 22 B50 means chapter 22 (Heraclitus), section B, fragment 50 in the Diels–Kranz arrangement. The inventory records all 90 chapters, while the reading pages list only those with included translations. This edition covers B entries and the unlettered sections of chapters 89–90. A testimonia and C imitations remain outside its scope. A B reference does not, by itself, establish authenticity.

The inventory contains 1,534 reference entries. The reader includes 1,234, with English available for 916. A further 300 await a translation suitable for inclusion and are listed separately. Partial translations and doubtful attributions are labelled. The alternate Diels 1922 view includes only translated units and preserves their original numbering. See the complete coverage record ↗

The notes identify Latin and Arabic witnesses, indirect transmission, differences between editions and the limits of each quotation. Published translations retain their wording when paired with a separately identified historical original. Longer source passages appear in the notes where their editions have been established. Omissions of supplementary context are explained.

How this fragment survives brings together explicit source citations found in the records for the selected reading. The sources index gathers those citations by author or collection. Each citation links to its evidence and distinguishes the selected reading from a supporting historical source record, which may contain a longer passage or a different editorial text. Unidentified citations remain unresolved. These records are not a complete account of manuscript transmission, and the presence of a source does not establish a fragment’s authenticity.

Reuse and attribution

Historical public-domain translations retain that status. The adapted ancient-text dataset and editorial metadata are offered under CC BY-SA 4.0 where applicable. This does not replace any separately stated translation or source licence. No new exclusive rights are claimed over ancient Greek or Latin texts.

When reusing a passage, keep its translator, edition, source and applicable licence. The copy button includes these credits.

The source review of 25 October 2026 considered the ordinary life-plus-70 term in Romania and the EU, US publication history and digital transcription licences. Translations with unresolved rights are withheld. The review does not establish reuse rights in every country, and a text’s availability online is not itself permission to reproduce it.

Plain-text licence notices

Artwork

The images show how later artists imagined these thinkers and their stories. They are not portraits made from life. Each museum identifies its image as public domain. The Rijksmuseum reproductions were obtained through Wikimedia Commons.

Heraclitus

Hendrick ter Brugghen, 1628. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-2784.

Ter Brugghen’s imagined Heraclitus leans on a terrestrial globe. The painting forms a pair with his Democritus.

Gift of B. Asscher, Amsterdam and H. Koetser, Amsterdam. Museum record ↗ · Image source ↗ · Public domain

Democritus

Hendrick ter Brugghen, 1628. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-2783.

Ter Brugghen’s laughing Democritus rests his arm on a celestial globe. The painting forms a pair with his Heraclitus.

Gift of B. Asscher, Amsterdam and H. Koetser, Amsterdam. Museum record ↗ · Image source ↗ · Public domain

Portrait of Pythagoras

René Boyvin, 1566. Engraving. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-2007-353.

An imagined portrait from a series of Greek and Roman philosophers and writers.

Purchased with the support of the F.G. Waller-Fonds. Museum record ↗ · Image source ↗ · Public domain

Studies for the Death of Empedocles

Salvator Rosa, after 1666. Pen and brown ink. SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, KKSgb438.

A sequence of figures depicts the legendary leap into Etna. This is an illustration of the story, not evidence of how Empedocles died.

SMK. Museum record ↗ · Image source ↗ · Public domain

Site and design credits

Created and maintained by Sergiu Alexandru Bîsceanu.

The reading layout was inspired by John H. Boyer’s Plato Reader and Greek Drama Reader. This is an independent project.

Following the typographic arrangement of the Plato Reader, the Greek is set in Cardo by David J. Perry and the translations in EB Garamond. Cardo also supplies the catalogue headings. The controls use your device’s system font. Cardo and EB Garamond are hosted with the site under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Cardo licence · Font and text notices.

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