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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Facing Pages · Branch 14 of 54
On Nature · Proem · Fragments 124–5
Ancient Greek
p. 25Clem. Alex., Strom. III 14, 2
ὢ πόποι, ὢ δειλὸν θνητῶν γένος, ὢ δυσάνολβον,τοίων ἔκ τ' ἐρίδων ἔκ τε στοναχῶν ἐγένεσθε.Clem. Alex., Strom. III 14, 2
ἐκ μὲν γὰρ ζωῶν ἐτίθει νεκρὰ εἴδε' ἀμείβων.‹ἐκ δὲ νεκρῶν ζώοντα›Porph. ap. Stob. I, p. 446, 7
δαίμων,σαρκῶν ἀλλογνῶτι περιστέλλουσα χιτῶνι.Plut., Quaest. conv. 728 E
‹τὰ δόγματα›στεγάσαι φρενὸς ἔλλοπος εἴσω.Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I: On Nature · Proem
p. 26Clem. Alex., Strom. III 14, 2
Alas, O wretched race of mortals, O hard-fated,
out of such strifes and such groanings were you born.
Clem. Alex., Strom. III 14, 2
For out of living things he set dead shapes, exchanging them,
‹and out of dead things, living ones.›
Porph. ap. Stob. I, p. 446, 7
a spirit,
wrapping them about in an alien tunic of flesh.
Plut., Quaest. conv. 728 E
‹the doctrines›
to keep sheltered within a speechless breast.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I · On Nature · Proem · Fragments 124–5
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.