Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

V. The system

Empedocles begins from four rhizōmata, "roots," named in fragment 6 under divine names: Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis. The word is worth pausing on. It is not stoicheion, "element" — a word that belongs to Plato and Aristotle, and that carries the later analysis with it; a root is a thing from which growth proceeds, and the metaphor is live. Aristotle nonetheless credits Empedocles with being the first to distinguish the four clearly, and the credit is deserved. The roots are eternal and ungenerated; nothing is added to them and nothing subtracted; what changes is their arrangement and the proportions of their mixture.

Which divine name attaches to which root is genuinely unresolved, and this edition does not conceal the fact. The disagreement is not a modern one. It is already fixed in the ancient reports: Aëtius makes Hera the air and Aidoneus the earth, while the Homeric Allegories preserved in Stobaeus and Hippolytus in his Refutation both reverse the pair, giving Hera the earth and Aidoneus the air. Hippolytus alone argues for it — air is Aidoneus, the unseen one, because we see all things through it and it alone we do not see. Diogenes Laertius, summarising the doctrine at the end of his Life, makes the same assignment as they do — Hera the earth, Aidoneus the air — so that Aëtius stands alone against three. The modern majority follows Aëtius all the same, and Diels assigned the air-reading to Theophrastus and the earth-reading to the Stoics; but the ancient tally runs three to one the other way, and what is being followed is a choice, not a consensus. There is general agreement that the four are fire, earth, air or aither, and water, and that Nestis is water — she moistens with her tears the springs of mortals. Beyond that, the majority view makes Zeus fire, Hera air and Aidoneus earth; an older variant exchanges Hera and Aidoneus; and Peter Kingsley has argued, with an etymological case about the range of aithēr in this period and a Sicilian-geological case about volcanic fire, that Zeus is air or aither and that Aidoneus is fire. The argument is serious and not fringe. Because the question is open, the divine names are transliterated in the translation and left to stand as names; a translation that silently rendered "Zeus" as "fire" would be settling by fiat a question that the evidence does not settle.

Two further powers move the roots: Love and Strife. Love is Philotēs, and appears also as Aphrodite, Cypris, Storgē, Gēthosynē and Harmonia — the multiplicity of names is itself part of the doctrine, and where Empedocles changes the name this translation changes it too. Strife is Neikos, and once, at 17.19, carries the epithet oulomenon, "destructive," the word Homer applies to the wrath of Achilles in the second line of the Iliad; at 109 the epithet is lygron, "baleful." The two are as eternal as the roots, and they alternate in dominance. Under the complete ascendancy of Love the four roots are wholly intermingled and at rest in the Sphairos — a masculine formation beside the ordinary feminine sphaira, "ball," and therefore a proper name and a god, which is why this translation keeps it as "Sphere" only where the personification is carried by the surrounding words and otherwise lets the god be a god. Fragments 27 to 29 describe him: no branching arms, no swift knees, no organs of generation, equal to himself on every side, rejoicing in his encircling solitude.

Whether the cycle contains one world-formation or two is the oldest live controversy in the subject and is not resolved. On the symmetrical reading, defended by Guthrie, O'Brien and M. R. Wright and today by Primavesi, the cycle is endlessly repeating with two distinct cosmogonies and two zoogonies, one as Love increases and one as Strife increases. On the revisionist reading of Bollack, Solmsen, Long and Hölscher there is only one cosmogony: Strife disintegrates the Sphairos and is responsible for the separation of the roots, and Love then builds the world and its living things. Both camps must find something to do with Aristotle's objection at De caelo 301a, that Empedocles shied away from a cosmogony beginning from already-separated elements because such a cosmogony is unreasonable. Byzantine scholia on Aristotle published by Marwan Rashed have added a timetable to the discussion — an increase of Love for sixty units, a perfect Sphere for forty, a rule of Strife for sixty — which Primavesi has interpreted as encoding a double tetractys multiplied by ten. The interpretation is ingenious and is not generally accepted.

The zoogony is the most vividly written part of what survives. In the first phase single limbs wander unattached: necks without heads, arms bereft of shoulders, eyes straying in want of foreheads. In the second, chance combinations arise — creatures with faces and breasts on both sides, ox-kinded things with the prow of a man, man-kinded things with the heads of oxen. Aristotle reports that the combinations fitted to survive persisted, and it has become conventional to see in this an anticipation of natural selection; Primavesi disputes the reading, and the fragments themselves do not describe a continuing process of selection so much as a single sorting. In the third phase whole-natured forms rise from the earth, undifferentiated, having a portion of both water and heat but as yet no lovely frame of limbs, no voice, and no member native to men. Sexual differentiation and reproduction belong to the fourth phase and to the present world.

Perception works by effluences and passages. Everything continually gives off aporrhoai, streams of tiny particles, and perception occurs when these fit the poroi, the passages, of a sense organ. The lantern simile of fragment 84 applies the theory to the eye, and the water-catcher of fragment 100 — a girl's bronze klepsydra, stopped with the thumb and dipped in water — is the most sustained piece of physical analogy in early Greek verse. Knowledge, on this account, is a matter of like meeting like: by earth we see earth, by water water, by aither divine aither, and by fire destroying fire. Thought is located in the blood about the heart.

Against this stands the doctrine of the daimon. Fragment 115 reports a decree of Necessity, sealed with broad oaths: a divinity who defiles himself with bloodshed or swears falsely must wander thirty thousand seasons away from the blessed, born through time into every kind of mortal shape, and the four roots expel him in turn — air drives him to sea, the sea spits him onto land, the land casts him into the sun's rays, and the sun hurls him back into the eddies of air. Empedocles then places himself among them: an exile from god and a wanderer, who put his trust in raving Strife. Fragment 117 gives the incarnations: boy, girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish out of the sea. Fragments 127 and 146 give the ladder of ascent: among beasts the lion is highest, among trees the laurel, and among men the seers, singers, physicians and chieftains, from whom the reborn spring up as gods.

It should be said clearly that no surviving fragment explains how transmigration is supposed to survive the total mixture of the Sphairos or the total separation under Strife, and that what the daimon is made of is the most contested question in the system. It has been identified with Love and Strife themselves, with embodied Love, with incorporeal imprints of the Sphere, with aither, with compounds of the roots, and with particles of Love; and it has been argued that the incompatibility with the physics survives every attempt at reconciliation. Empedocles never uses the word psychē for the transmigrating self, and this translation never renders daimōn as "soul," which would import a Platonic psychology that is not there.

From the doctrine follow the prohibitions. Sacrifice is kin-murder, and the argument is physical rather than sentimental: since transmigration is a fact, the father who cuts the throat of the changed son at the altar is committing in literal truth what fragment 137 describes. Meat-eating is the same crime domesticated. Laurel is forbidden because it stands at the head of plant life, and beans are forbidden in the Pythagorean manner. Behind the prohibitions lies the golden age of fragments 128 to 130, when Cypris alone was queen, no altar was drenched with the unmixed blood of bulls, the beasts and birds were tame toward men, and worship was made with myrrh and frankincense and libations of yellow honey.