Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

INTRODUCTION

I. Empedocles of Acragas

Empedocles was a citizen of Acragas, the Greek city on the south coast of Sicily that the Romans called Agrigentum and that is now Agrigento. He belonged to a rich and prominent family: Diogenes Laertius makes him the son of Meton and the grandson of an earlier Empedocles who kept racehorses and was remembered for an Olympic victory, which Eratosthenes, citing Aristotle, dated to the seventy-first Olympiad, 496/5 BC.

The one chronological datum that deserves real confidence is that he died at sixty, a figure Diogenes reports on the authority of Aristotle and of Heraclides. Everything else in the ancient chronology is in conflict with something else. Diogenes puts his floruit in the eighty-fourth Olympiad, 444–441 BC; the Suda puts it in the seventy-seventh, some twenty-eight years earlier, and cannot even settle his father's name, offering Archinomos and Exainetos as alternatives to Meton. Modern handbooks generally settle on something like 495–435 BC, and that is the range assumed here. It should be understood as a convention rather than a result.

The political anecdotes are the most credible part of the biography, because they are local, unmiraculous, and of a kind that Sicilian historians could plausibly have known. Diogenes reports that Empedocles broke up an oligarchic council called the Thousand three years after its establishment, and that he declined the kingship of Acragas when it was offered him. Whether this makes him a democratic partisan is now disputed; the anecdotes reach us through Timaeus at several removes, and the Hellenistic biographical industry was capable of manufacturing exactly this sort of material.

The famous stories are certainly legend. The leap into the crater of Etna, with the bronze slipper thrown back up by the flames to betray the attempted apotheosis, is attributed by Diogenes to Hippobotus, and stands in his Life among at least four other incompatible accounts of the death: a fall from a carriage on the road to Messene, a drowning, a departure for the Peloponnese from which he never returned, and a life prolonged to a hundred and nine. The multiplicity is itself the argument against all of them. The miracle stories are equally legendary but more interesting, because they correspond so exactly to what the poem itself promises. Empedocles is said to have stopped the etesian winds at Acragas with bags of ass-hide, earning the epithet kōlysanemas, "wind-stayer"; to have revived a woman given up by the physicians; to have ended a plague at Selinus by diverting two rivers. Fragment 111, where the poet undertakes to teach Pausanias how to stop the winds, turn drought to rain, and lead back from Hades the strength of a dead man, is very likely the source of the legends rather than independent confirmation of them.

His relation to Pythagoras and to Parmenides was already a matter of dispute in antiquity, and the ancient answers are biographical where the real evidence is textual. Timaeus made him a pupil of Pythagoras, later convicted of logoklopia, "stealing his discourses," and barred from the lectures; the Suda makes Parmenides his teacher; Hermippus preferred Xenophanes. The chronology strains against direct discipleship in every case. What is not in doubt is the engagement with Parmenides in the verses themselves. Fragments 8, 9, 11, 12 and 17 are built directly against the Eleatic denial of coming-to-be, and they concede its central point while refusing its consequence: nothing comes to be or perishes, but what men call birth and death are mixture and separation of things that always are. The Pythagorean connection rests on the vegetarianism, the transmigration, and the bean-taboo, which is a better foundation than the master-and-pupil story it is usually attached to.