Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

VII. The Greek text, and what is not in it

The Greek printed here is that of Hermann Diels, whose Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta of 1901 and Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker of 1903 established the numbering that every subsequent edition has had to accommodate. Diels's text is reproduced as transmitted, including his iota adscripts, his editorial supplements in angle brackets, his daggers, and his occasional readings that later editors have altered. Where the arrangement in which his text has come down separates or conflates fragments differently from the standard numbering, the standard numbering has been restored and the divergence recorded in the notes.

Three things are deliberately absent.

The first is the Strasbourg papyrus. Its verses are ancient, but the text a reader would want — the arrangement of the ensembles, the supplements that make the broken lines yield sense, the placement within Book I — is the work of Martin and Primavesi and of the scholars who have argued with them, and it is recent scholarship rather than transmitted text. The same applies to the new Cairo papyrus and to Janko's reconstruction of Book I. This edition describes those results and does not reprint them. A reader who wants the papyrus text should go to the editio princeps, which is where the argument for every supplement can also be inspected.

The second is a critical apparatus in the proper sense. What appears beneath each fragment is the ancient source: the author, work and place at which the quotation is preserved. This tells a reader where the words come from and how far they can be checked, which is the information most often wanted; it does not record manuscript variants or the conjectures of editors since Diels.

The third is the testimonia. The A-fragments of Diels-Kranz — the reports and summaries about Empedocles rather than quotations of him, among them Theophrastus on perception and Aëtius on the four zoogonic stages — are not printed here, though they are drawn on throughout this introduction. A reader working seriously on the cosmic cycle or on the theory of perception will need them, and will not find them in this book.

Fragments 154 to 157 of Diels-Kranz, generally regarded as spurious, are omitted. Fragment 158, which stands outside the numbered series and is equally doubtful, is nonetheless printed, because the arrangement followed here transmits it among the Purifications; a note marks its status. Fragments 151 to 153a are included although they are single words or bare reports, since a reader looking for them should be able to find out what they are; each carries a note explaining the context in the quoting author, without which they are unintelligible.