Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

VI. The translation

The aim throughout has been a close, plain, line-for-line English: each English line answers the Greek line that faces it, so that a reader with some Greek can use the translation as a crib and a reader with none can see where the sense of a particular verse lies. No attempt has been made to reproduce the hexameter. Where the syntax of a sentence runs across several verses, the English has been allowed to run with it rather than being broken into self-contained units, but the line boundaries are kept.

A few decisions of vocabulary are worth stating, since consistency in them matters more than elegance in any one place.

Rhizōmata is "roots," never "elements." Philotēs is "Love" and Neikos is "Strife," both capitalised as divine names; "Attraction" and "Repulsion" have been avoided as modern physical glosses that destroy the personification, and so has "Hate," which is too psychological. Where Empedocles uses Cypris or Aphrodite instead of Love, the substitution is preserved.

Daimōn is "spirit" or is left as it stands, never "soul." Sphairos is treated as a name.

Harmoniē is rendered by words of fitting and joining rather than by "harmony." The Homeric sense is a carpenter's: the joining of timbers. In fragment 96 the bone is glued and fitted together by Harmonia, and the image is joinery, not music.

Thnēta, "mortal things," is a technical term for the compounds formed out of the roots, and covers bones and stones as well as animals; it has not been narrowed to "mortals" where the context is physical.

Physis in fragment 8 does not mean "nature" in any modern sense. The line says that there is no physis of any mortal thing, and the word there means birth or coming-to-be; the point of the fragment is precisely that what men call birth is only mixture. To translate "there is no nature of anything" would turn a claim about generation into a claim about essence, and reverse the argument.

Mētis is cunning or contrivance, the practical intelligence of the craftsman, and is not "wisdom."

Poroi have been rendered "passages" or "channels" rather than "pores," since the Greek word means a way through and the English word means a small opening in the skin. Where "effluences" appears for aporrhoai it is the conventional rendering, and the flowing metaphor should be heard in it.

Angle brackets in the Greek mark editorial supplements, and are reproduced in the English. Daggers mark passages the editors regarded as corrupt. Rows of dots mark where a quotation begins or ends in the middle of a sentence, which is very often. Two fragments are not verse at all: fragment 92 survives only as Aristotle's prose paraphrase, and fragment 94 only in a Latin rendering in Plutarch; both are translated as what they are, and identified as such in the notes.