Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

APPENDIX I: IN ANTIQUITY

What the ancient world made of him

The testimonia in this volume are evidence about Empedocles. They are also, read the other way, evidence about the people quoting him, and a reader who has come this far will have noticed that the ancient world could not settle what kind of thing he was.

The physicians claimed him. Galen at A 3 names him with Pausanias and Philistion as one of the medical schools of Italy, set beside Cos and Cnidus — not a philosopher with an interest in medicine but a tradition of doctoring with pupils of its own. Soranus at A 79 and A 80 cites him in a working obstetrical handbook, once to follow him and once to correct him. Caelius Aurelianus, closing the A-testimonia at A 98, reports that his school distinguished two kinds of madness, one bodily and one a purification of the soul.

The philosophers disputed him. Aristotle is the most frequent witness in this book and almost always an opponent; but at A 78 he concedes the one point that mattered, that bone is not an element nor a heap of elements but the ratio of their mixture, and that on this Empedocles was "led by the truth itself." Theophrastus gave him a whole chapter, printed here as A 86, and used eighteen sections of it to take him apart. Plato names him once, in the Meno at A 92, and then only to offer his optics as a specimen of the kind of definition that impresses without explaining — and in the Phaedo at A 76, without naming him at all, as one of the questions a young man could not make come out.

The oldest surviving criticism is not philosophical but professional. The Hippocratic writer at A 71 does not say Empedocles is wrong about what a man is; he says the question is out of place, and that a physician who begins from the origin of the cosmos has begun in the wrong century. That was written within living memory of him, possibly within his lifetime.

And the critics could not decide whether he was a poet. Aristotle's verdict at A 22 — that he and Homer share nothing but the metre — settled the matter for most of European criticism, and A 24 and A 25 collect the echoes. What the verdict conceals is that nobody denied the verse was good: Aristotle's complaint in the Rhetoric is that it is too persuasive, carrying an audience along as an oracle does, and Cicero's joke at A 25 concedes in passing that the poem was excellent. What they could not name was a man who had written the best poem in a kind they did not think was poetry.

The warmest ancient reader was a Roman who disagreed with him about everything. Lucretius' praise stands at A 21; what follows it there, and is printed below, is the refutation — and the two together are the best single illustration of how antiquity read Empedocles.

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things I 734–741

The lines that follow the praise printed at A 21

Hic tamen et supra quos diximus inferiores

partibus egregie multis multoque minores,

quamquam multa bene ac divinitus invenientes

ex adyto tamquam cordis responsa dedere

sanctius et multo certa ratione magis quam

Pythia quae tripodi a Phoebi lauroque profatur,

principiis tamen in rerum fecere ruinas

et graviter magni magno cecidere ibi casu.

Yet this man, and those we spoke of above — lesser than he, and by many degrees and much the smaller — though they found out much that was good and god-given, and delivered answers as though from the shrine of the heart, more holy and far more certainly reasoned than anything the Pythia utters from Apollo's tripod and laurel: these men, for all that, came to ruin over the first principles of things, and, great as they were, fell there, and fell heavily.

Sixty lines of demolition follow. The charges are the standard Epicurean ones — that Empedocles denies the void while requiring motion, that his elements are soft and rare and so cannot be ultimate, that he allows no limit to division. But the terms of the praise are not withdrawn: the oracle from the shrine of the heart is meant, and so is the comparison with Delphi, in a poem whose whole purpose is to abolish oracles. Lucretius has found the exact register for a predecessor who was right about the method and wrong about the answer, and no Greek source manages anything so generous. The text is Munro's; most editors read hi for the manuscripts' hic in the first line, which makes the plural govern the whole sentence.