Diotimos Library · Greek Antiquity Collection · Bilingual Edition
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II
The Greek and Latin of Hermann Diels · New English translation and notes.
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English Page · Branch 39 of 126
The Life · A 16
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 68Strabo, Geography
νομίζειν δ' ἐκ τῆς τοιαύτης ὄψεως πολλὰ μυθεύεσθαι καὶ μάλιστα οἷά φασί τινες περὶ Ἐμπεδοκλέους, ὅτι καθάλοιτο εἰς τὸν κρατῆρα καὶ καταλίποι τοῦ πάθους ἴχνος τῶν ἐμβάδων τὴν ἑτέραν ἃς ἐφόρει χαλκᾶς. εὑρεθῆναι γὰρ ἔξω μικρὸν ἄπωθεν τοῦ χείλους τοῦ κρατῆρος ὡς ἀνερριμμένην ὑπὸ τῆς βίας τοῦ πυρός.
Horace, The Art of Poetry
si curet quis opem ferre et demittere funem, "qui scis, an prudens huc se deiecerit atque servari nolit?" dicam, Siculique poetae narrabo interitum. deus immortalis haberi dum cupit Empedocles, ardentem frigidus Aetnam insiluit. sit ius liceatque perire poetis: invitum qui servat, idem facit occidenti.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: The Life
p. 69The bronze sandal, and Horace on the right to die
Strabo, Geography
One must suppose that a sight of this kind breeds a great deal of storytelling — above all the sort of thing some people say about Empedocles: that he leapt down into the crater and left, as a trace of what befell him, one of the bronze boots he used to wear; for it was found a little way outside the lip of the crater, as though thrown up by the force of the fire.
Horace, The Art of Poetry
And if anyone should trouble to bring help and let down a rope: "How do you know he did not throw himself in on purpose, and does not want to be saved?" I shall say — and I shall tell the death of the Sicilian poet. Wanting to be thought an immortal god, Empedocles coolly jumped into burning Etna. Let poets have the right and the licence to perish: whoever saves a man against his will does the same as one who kills him.
Reception: a geographer's scepticism and a poet's joke.
Strabo, who knew the mountain, does not deny the story so much as explain it: a volcano is the kind of sight that generates tales. Horace has stopped caring whether it happened. By the Augustan age the leap into Etna has become a stock example in a handbook of literary manners — the punchline in a joke about not rescuing poets — and that is the form in which it reached the modern world, by way of Hölderlin and Matthew Arnold. What the joke required, and what it destroyed, is the man Timaeus describes at A 1 §§ 71–72.
Bearing on Volume I. A 1 §§ 69–72, where the story is told and then demolished.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · The Life · A 16
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Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Empedocles survives not only through his poems but through the ancient writers who described his life, doctrines, medicine, cosmology, and extraordinary reputation. Volume II gathers the testimonia: ninety-nine numbered reports drawn from fifty-two authors across nine centuries. The English introduction appears full width; each Greek or Latin testimony then faces its new English translation.
Historical Text and Translation
The Greek and Latin reading text follows Hermann Diels’s third edition of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1912), retaining the supplied edition’s Diels-Kranz numbering and editorial signs. These witnesses must be read as a chain of transmission: many preserve valuable evidence, while others summarize, dispute, reshape, or repeat earlier accounts.
About Diotimos Editions
Diotimos Editions prepared the new English translation, introduction, notes, and reception appendices for this volume. The translation keeps each witness distinct and preserves its technical vocabulary, argumentative posture, and relationship to the surviving poetry in Volume I.
Rights
The ancient source works and Hermann Diels’s 1912 Greek and Latin edition are in the public domain. The 2026 English translation, introduction, notes, and editorial matter are original to this edition and remain © 2026 Diotimos.