The first ancient Greek to use the term philosophos, “wisdom-loving,” was Heraclitus, the late sixth-century Greek obsessed with change, a resident of the silting-up city of Ephesus. As we have seen, he said no river stayed the same. He placed fire at the center of the cosmic order and decreed that everything was in flux. Like Thales, later Greeks assumed that Heraclitus had learned from “the barbarian philosophy.” Perhaps he had been stimulated by the sanctity of fire in the Persians’ religion, Zoroastrianism.
