Diotimos Library · Greek Antiquity Collection · Bilingual Edition
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
On Nature · The Purifications · Ancient Greek with a new English translation.
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English Page · Branch 41 of 54
On Nature · Book II · Fragment 111
Ancient Greek
p. 79Diog. Laert. VIII 59
ὀρνύμενοι πνοιαῖσι καταφθινύθουσιν ἀρούρας·καὶ πάλιν, ἢν ἐθέληισθα, παλίντιτα πνεύματ' ἐπάξεις· 5θήσεις δ' ἐξ ὄμβροιο κελαινοῦ καίριον αὐχμόνἀνθρώποις, θήσεις δὲ καὶ ἐξ αὐχμοῖο θερείουῥεύματα δενδρεόθρεπτα, τά τ' αἰθέρι ναιήσονται,ἄξεις δ' ἐξ Ἀίδαο καταφθιμένου μένος ἀνδρός.Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I: On Nature · Book II
p. 80Diog. Laert. VIII 59
and with their blasts lay waste the ploughlands;
and again, if you wish, you shall bring requiting breezes back; 5
you shall make, out of black rain, a drought seasonable
for men; and you shall make, out of summer drought,
tree-nourishing streams that will dwell in the aither;
and you shall lead out of Hades the strength of a man who has died.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I · On Nature · Book II · Fragment 111
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Empedocles of Acragas wrote philosophy as poetry: a cosmic account of the four roots, Love, and Strife alongside a religious vision of exile, purification, and return. This Volume I reader preserves the supplied edition’s complete English introduction before changing to Ancient Greek and line-for-line English facing pages for the surviving fragments of On Nature and The Purifications.
Historical Text and Translation
The Ancient Greek reading text follows Hermann Diels’s Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta (1901) and Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). The supplied edition retains Diels’s iota adscripts, editorial brackets, fragment numbering, and the ancient author and location that preserve each quotation. It excludes the Strasbourg and Cairo papyri, later papyrological reconstructions, and the Diels-Kranz A-fragments for the reasons stated in its Introduction.
About Diotimos Editions
Diotimos Editions prepared this new translation directly from the Greek printed opposite it. The translation is line-for-line: each English line answers the Greek line that faces it, while English syntax is allowed to continue across verse boundaries when clarity requires it.
Rights
Empedocles’s ancient Greek work and Hermann Diels’s 1901/1903 Greek editions are in the public domain. The 2026 English translation, introduction, and editorial matter are original to this edition and remain © 2026 Diotimos.