Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

II. The poems, and how they survive

Apart from two papyri, every word of Empedocles that we possess is a quotation embedded in the work of a later author. There is no manuscript tradition of the poem itself. Three consequences follow, and the reader of a bilingual edition should keep all three in view.

First, what survives was selected by men with their own arguments to make. Simplicius quotes Empedocles to expound Aristotle; Sextus Empiricus quotes him for a thesis about the criterion of truth; Clement and Hippolytus quote him for Christian apologetic purposes; Plutarch quotes him against the Epicureans. The proportions of what we have reflect their interests, not Empedocles'.

Second, the boundaries of the fragments are editorial. Where a quotation begins and ends is a decision made by the quoting author, and where a modern editor marks the fragment off is a second decision made on top of the first. The numbered units in this book are not units of Empedocles' composition.

Third, the order is editorial too, except in the few places where a witness names a book number. This is the single most important thing to understand about any edition of Empedocles, including this one, and it is discussed further in section IV.

Simplicius, the sixth-century Neoplatonist commentator on Aristotle, is by a wide margin our largest source, and the only one who regularly cites with book numbers. He still had substantial portions of the physical poem in front of him, and he preserves the long continuous stretches on which every reconstruction depends: fragments 17, 21, 26, 35, 96 and 98, and he is the second witness to 27. Aristotle is the earliest and the most philosophically weighted witness, and mentions Empedocles more often than any philosopher except Plato, but his quotations are short and embedded in criticism. Plutarch cites or refers to him more than eighty times across the extant works and wrote a lost study of him in ten books; he is our source for much of the eschatological material. Sextus Empiricus preserves few fragments but heavy ones: the epistemological proem, fragments 2 and 3, and the two great anti-sacrifice fragments, 136 and 137. Clement, Hippolytus, Diogenes Laertius, Stobaeus, Aëtius, Theophrastus, Porphyry, Aelian, Athenaeus, Proclus and Tzetzes supply the remainder.

It is worth stating plainly which fragments depend on a single witness, because a single-witness fragment has no collateral for emendation. Fragments 17 and 35, the two longest and doctrinally most important physical passages, are transmitted by Simplicius alone; the entire reconstruction of the cosmic cycle rests on one Neoplatonist's manuscript. Fragments 136 and 137 depend on Sextus alone, and 114 and 147 on Clement alone. Fragment 6, on which the identification of the four roots with the four divine names depends, reaches us through the doxographer Aëtius and, in the form printed here, through Tzetzes. Fragment 115 is the one place where the witnesses are plural — Plutarch and Hippolytus both have it, and Plotinus alludes to it — but Plutarch gives only part of it, so Hippolytus remains in effect the sole continuous witness, and the text of the thirteenth line is disputed between three readings.

Diogenes reports that the On Nature and the Purifications together ran to five thousand lines, and a Medical Discourse to six hundred. The Suda gives the On Nature two books and two thousand lines. The two figures cannot both be right, and they may not be two independent witnesses at all: both may descend from the Hellenistic bibliographer Lobon of Argos, who is notoriously unreliable. What survives in this book is on the order of a tenth of what the ancient totals imply, and possibly less.