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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Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 58
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 134Aëtius
Ἐ. τοῦ ἀέρος εἴξαντος τῆι τοῦ ἡλίου ὁρμῆι ἐπικλιθῆναι τὰς ἄρκτους, καὶ τὰ μὲν βόρεια ὑψωθῆναι, τὰ δὲ νότια ταπεινωθῆναι, καθ' ὃ καὶ τὸν ὅλον κόσμον.
Aëtius
Ἐ. ὑπὸ τῆς περιεχούσης αὐτὸν σφαίρας κωλυόμενον ἄχρι παντὸς εὐθυπορεῖν καὶ ὑπὸ τῶν τροπικῶν κύκλων.
Aëtius
σελήνης αὐτὸν ὑπερχομένης.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 135The tilt of the heavens; the sun's turning
Aëtius
Empedocles: the air having yielded to the sun's onrush, the Bears were tilted over, and the northern regions were raised and the southern lowered — and with them the whole cosmos.
Aëtius
Empedocles: [the sun turns back] because it is prevented by the sphere enclosing it from travelling straight on without end, and by the tropic circles.
Doxographic report, two notices.
The obliquity of the ecliptic is here given a physical history rather than a geometry: the heavens are tilted because something pushed them. Whatever else is true of it, this is a cosmology in which the present arrangement is the outcome of an event.
Bearing on Volume I. Explains the seasons as residue of an accident, not as design.
ἄρκτους] the celestial north pole.
Solar eclipse
Aëtius
[The sun is eclipsed] when the moon passes beneath it.
Doxographic report, one line.
Correct, and stated without qualification.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 58
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.