  Heraclitus made every effort to break out of the mold of contemporary thought. Although he was influenced in a number of ways by the thought and language of his predecessors, including the epic poets Homer and Hesiod, the poet and philosopher Xenophanes, the historian and antiquarian Hecataeus, the religious guru Pythagoras, the sage Bias of Priene, the poet Archilochus, and the Milesian philosophers, he criticized most of them either explicitly or implicitly, and struck out on his own path. He rejected polumathiê or information-gathering on the grounds that it “does not teach understanding”  (B40).[1]  He treated the epic poets as fools and called Pythagoras a fraud.