Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

IV. One poem or two, and the order of this edition

Diels divided the fragments between two poems, On Nature and the Purifications, and explained the doctrinal tension between physics and transmigration by positing a spiritual development in their author. The hypothesis has the weakness that it can be run in either chronological direction and so explains nothing. The division nonetheless became standard, and remains the framework within which most readers first meet Empedocles.

Against it stands a tradition of argument running from Charles Kahn in 1960 through Catherine Osborne's "Empedocles Recycled" of 1987 to Brad Inwood's edition, which prints the fragments as a single poem, and to Simon Trépanier and Richard Janko. Osborne's case is methodological and negative: the assumptions underpinning the division are shakier than they look, the ancient sources do not draw it cleanly, assignment by subject matter is circular, and Hippolytus — our most extended ancient expositor — reads the entire system through the daimones, which is hard to reconcile with a clean partition between a scientific poem and a religious one. Tom Mackenzie has argued that a passage in the papyrus functions as a table of contents, promising accounts of animals, humans and plants in that order, a programme apparently fulfilled by fragments distributed across both alleged works.

Against that, in turn, David Sedley, Peter Kingsley, Giovanni Cerri, Oliver Primavesi and Jean-Claude Picot have continued to defend two poems, with Kingsley adding the striking proposal that the Purifications came first. Jean Bollack occupies a middle position: two works within one coordinated undertaking, addressed to different audiences. Chiara Ferella has recently argued that the two poems differ formally rather than in content — the On Nature a doctrinal exposition, the Purifications a collection of heterogeneous ritual material — and that fragment 115 belongs to the proem of On Nature rather than to the Purifications.

The reader should understand that there is no neutral order available. To print Diels's order is to embed the two-poem hypothesis; to print Inwood's is to embed the one-poem hypothesis. The honest course is to print in a stated order and say what that order presupposes.

This edition prints the fragments in the arrangement of Diels, in the sequence and the grouping in which his text has been transmitted: a proem and three books of On Nature, then the Purifications, then fragments of uncertain placement. The arrangement is retained because it is the one to which the standard numbering is keyed and because it makes the book usable alongside the scholarship, not because the underlying hypothesis is here endorsed. Readers should treat the section headings as an editorial convenience of the late nineteenth century and not as a report about the shape of Empedocles' work. In particular, the placement of the daimon fragments — 115 through 126 — in the proem of On Nature rather than in the Purifications reflects a judgement that the papyrus has made defensible, but it is a judgement, and the traditional assignment of most of that material to the Purifications is recorded in the notes.