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 61
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 138Aëtius
Ἐ. διπλάσιον ἀπέχειν τὴν σελήνην ἀπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου ἤπερ ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς (Plut.)· διπλάσιον ἀπέχειν τῆς σελήνης ἀπὸ γῆς ἤπερ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου (Stob.).
Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies
ὥσπερ ὁ Ἐ. πάντα τὸν καθ' ἡμᾶς τόπον ἔφη κακῶν μεστὸν εἶναι καὶ μέχρι μὲν σελήνης τὰ κακὰ φθάνειν ἐκ τοῦ περὶ γῆν τόπου ταθέντα, περαιτέρω δὲ μὴ χωρεῖν, ἅτε καθαρωτέρου τοῦ ὑπὲρ τὴν σελήνην παντὸς ὄντος τόπου· οὕτω καὶ τῶι Ἡρακλείτωι ἔδοξεν.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 139The distance of the moon
Aëtius
Empedocles: the moon is twice as far from the sun as it is from the earth (so the ps.-Plutarch branch); the moon is twice as far from the earth as from the sun (so Stobaeus).
Doxographic report, the two branches in disagreement.
The two branches of the tradition contradict each other, and Diels judges that neither preserves what Empedocles said. The entry is printed here not for its astronomy but as a specimen of how a numerical claim decays in transmission: the figure survives and the terms it relates do not.
Bearing on Volume I. A worked example of what the witness gradient in the headnote describes.
Diels: "it ought to read: the sun is twice as far from the earth as the moon is."
Evil reaches as far as the moon
Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies
As Empedocles said that the whole region about us is full of evils, and that the evils reach as far as the moon, stretched out from the region around the earth, but go no further, since the whole region above the moon is purer. Heraclitus held the same.
Report from a hostile Christian source, but doctrinally precise.
This is cosmology and doctrine of the soul at the same point. The moon is the boundary of the world of exile described in the Purifications; above it the air is clean. The physics and the religion are not two systems in this man but one, and here the join is visible.
Bearing on Volume I. The clearest testimony that the two poems share a single geography.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 61
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.