Heraclitus Is Said to Have Left One Book in a Temple. Its Very Shape Is Disputed.
Heraclitus is said to have written a single book — a papyrus roll — and deposited it in the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
The report is plausible on its own terms: temples often served as storehouses for money and other valuables, and no libraries are known from Heraclitus' time, so a temple is the obvious place for a scroll to end up.
What that book was like is another matter, and scholars disagree. It could have been a fairly coherent, consecutive argument; against that, the more than one hundred fragments that survive do not easily connect with one another, even though they probably represent a sizable fraction of the whole.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Putting the roll in a temple makes the book sound like an asset — less a publication than a valuable parked next to the money.
Knowing where the roll ended up tells us nothing about how to read it, though. A hundred-odd fragments can be a large share of the book and still refuse to line up in order.