The Same Kitchen Twice

There's an anecdote, derived from Aristotle, which goes like this:

Some visitors came to visit Heraclitus.  They found him warming himself at his kitchen stove. So they waited outside the door, expecting him to come out and welcome them into the more formal part of the house. But he called them into the humble kitchen, saying, "There are gods in here, too."

A nice story (provided you can avoid the temptation to add the coda, "So they humoured him from a safe distance, while someone discreetly called for an ambulance"), one often quoted as a part of the canon of The Gospel of the God of Small Things.  As someone who has always felt most convivial seated at a relaxed kitchen table, I must say I've always fancied the idea of a long winter's afternoon spent beside Heraclitus' AGA stove, putting the world to rights.

But, if you like the sound of a classicist warming himself up on a cold morning by heaving a mighty axe to split a few hairs ("Impossible? No, philological!"*), you'll probably enjoy this paper, originally published in the journal Ancient Philosophy in 2001.  I had no idea that this little story was itself an illustration used by Aristotle to make a bigger point about the need to study even the more repellent minibeasts, as today's children have been taught to call them.  As ever, context is everything.

* I have several times in this blog made plays on this formula, and I now realise that it is utterly meaningless to non-Brits or anyone under about 45 (I suppose the same might cruelly be said of this blog as a whole...).  Back in the 1970s, there was a TV advertising campaign for Ariel washing powder, the first to contain enzymes, and thus tagged as a "biological" washing powder.  Its catchphrase was, "Impossible?  No, biological!"...  Heh.  You had to be there...