Empedocles

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The philosophical tradition remembers Empedocles for a physics: four eternal roots, fire, air, water and earth, combined and separated forever by two opposed forces he named Love and Strife, an answer to Parmenides' argument that real change is impossible. The biographical tradition, less reliably, remembers something else. Diogenes Laertius, writing seven centuries later and drawing partly on Aristotle's own lost writings, records that after Acragas overthrew its ruling oligarchy, the city offered Empedocles its kingship, and that he turned it down, preferring, in Aristotle's own phrase, a frugal life to rule of any kind. The same tradition has him storming out of a dinner party in disgust when a host tried to seat guests by rank and delay the wine for the powerful, apparently on the theory that a city that tolerates small inequalities at the table will tolerate large ones everywhere else. None of this can be checked against a contemporary source; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy warns plainly that the biographical tradition behind these stories contains romantic embellishments of uncertain historical value, and the same caution applies to the far more famous legend, also from this tradition, that Empedocles ended his life by leaping into the crater of Mount Etna to fake a divine disappearance, a story modern scholarship no longer credits at all; he may in fact have died in the Peloponnese. What actually survives of Empedocles is not the biography but the physics: a philosopher who thought the world was built from four things that never change, endlessly rearranged by two forces that do all the work, is also, on the evidence we have, the one pre-Socratic remembered as having said no to a throne.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ancient sources credit Empedocles with two poems. On Nature (Peri Physeos) lays out the physics: the four roots, Love and Strife, the birth and dissolution of worlds and creatures. Purifications (Katharmoi) is about something that looks, on the surface, like a different subject entirely: transmigration of souls, ritual purity, and a fallen daimon working through cycles of incarnation to earn its way back to the divine. For most of the modern history of Empedocles scholarship, the working assumption was that these were exactly what they looked like, two separate poems on two separate subjects, one natural philosophy and one closer to religious doctrine, and that reconciling the cool, mechanistic four-roots physics of the first with the moralized cosmic drama of the second was Empedocles' own problem to have created, not the reader's to solve. Then, in 1994, a set of papyrus fragments surfaced at the University of Strasbourg, badly damaged, reused centuries ago as mummy wrapping, but identifiably Empedoclean. Some of the verses matched or extended passages long assigned to Purifications on the strength of the transmigration material. Except several of them were physics, cosmological material about the roots and the forces, sitting in the same continuous block of text as lines about souls and purification. The papyrus did not settle the question of how many poems Empedocles wrote. It did make the two-poems assumption much harder to defend cleanly, and strengthened the case, now taken seriously by specialists, that Empedocles never meant physics and purification as separate projects at all, that the four roots and the wandering, guilty daimon were always one account of the world, told twice, in two registers.