Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

Diogenes Laertius VIII 55

Neanthes says that down to Philolaus and Empedocles the Pythagoreans shared their discourses freely; but when Empedocles made them public in his poem they laid down a law that they should be imparted to no epic poet. He says that Plato suffered the same, for he too was barred. But which of them Empedocles studied under, Neanthes did not say — for the letter that circulates as Telauges', saying that he had been a pupil of Hippasus and Brotinus, is not to be trusted. Theophrastus says that he was an emulator of Parmenides, and an imitator of him in his poems, since Parmenides too had brought out his account of nature in epic verse.

Biography, with four incompatible accounts of the family and one of the quarrel.

Four authorities give the father four different names — Meton, Exaenetus, Archinomus — and Diogenes reports them all without deciding. Two things here are worth more than the genealogy. The first is the ox of honey and barley-meal: a man who held that all killing was murder still had to make a public sacrifice, and made one that spilled no blood. The second is Neanthes' law. Whether or not the Pythagoreans really passed it, the tradition understood perfectly what Empedocles had done — he put into hexameters, for anyone to read, what had been the property of a closed society. The charge of stealing discourses is the same charge in older language.

Bearing on Volume I. B 112 opens the Purifications; B 129 is the portrait of "a man of surpassing knowledge," Pythagoras or Parmenides.

19 Ἐμπεδοκλέους … Ἐξαίνετος: Schwartz's correction; compare Eusebius, Chronicle I 204, and Diodorus XIII 82, 7. The quotations are fragments B 112 and B 129.