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 46 of 126
The Life · A 24–A 25 (continued)
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 82Cicero, On the Orator
liceat ista ratione dicamus pila bene et duodecim scriptis ludere proprium esse iuris civilis, quoniam utrumque eorum P. Mucius optime fecerit; eademque ratione dicantur ei quos φυσικοὺς Graeci nominant, eidem poetae, quoniam Empedocles physicus egregium poema fecerit.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: The Life
p. 83Cicero, On the Orator
On that reasoning we may say that playing ball well, and playing at draughts, belong to the civil law, because Publius Mucius did both supremely well; and by the same reasoning let those whom the Greeks call natural philosophers be called poets too, because Empedocles the natural philosopher wrote an excellent poem.
Reception: six witnesses, five of them denying he is a poet.
The Life ends on the question it could not settle. Five of these six deny him the name of poet, and they deny it on the same ground: metre is not enough, and what he wrote was instruction. Two things are worth noticing against them. Aristotle's charge in the Rhetoric is not that the verse is bad but that it is persuasive — that a long circuit of words carries an audience along as an oracle does, which is a complaint about power, not weakness. And Cicero's joke concedes the point it means to mock: everyone agreed the poem was excellent. What they could not agree was what to call a man who had written the best poem in a genre they did not think was poetry.
Bearing on Volume I. A 22, Aristotle's verdict in the Poetics, of which these are the echoes.
24 the name Tyrtaeus has not yet been satisfactorily emended. Compare Plutarch, How the Young Should Study Poetry 2. The sea as the earth's sweat is A 66.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · The Life · A 24–A 25 (continued)
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
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.