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 88 of 126
Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 75
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 166Aëtius
Ἐ. ὅτε ἐγεννᾶτο τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος ἐκ τῆς γῆς, τοσαύτην γενέσθαι τῶι μήκει τοῦ χρόνου διὰ τὸ βραδυπορεῖν τὸν ἥλιον τὴν ἡμέραν, ὁπόση νῦν ἐστιν ἡ δεκάμηνος· προϊόντος δὲ τοῦ χρόνου, τοσαύτην γενέσθαι τὴν ἡμέραν, ὁπόση νῦν ἐστιν ἡ ἑπτάμηνος· διὰ τοῦτο καὶ τὰ δεκάμηνα καὶ τὰ ἑπτάμηνα, τῆς φύσεως τοῦ κόσμου οὕτω μεμελετηκυίας, αὔξεσθαι ἐν μιᾶι ἡμέραι ἧι τίκτεται τὸ βρέφος.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 167Why both ten-month and seven-month children live
Aëtius
Empedocles: when the human race was being generated out of the earth, the day — because the sun travelled slowly — was as long as a ten-month term is now; and as time went on the day became as long as a seven-month term is now. This is why both ten-month and seven-month children are viable: the nature of the cosmos having so practised it, the infant completes its growth in a single day, the day on which it is born.
Doxographic report, the text probably damaged.
A difficult and probably garbled notice, but its premise is not garbled: the length of a day has changed since the world began, because the sun once moved more slowly. Gestation is measured against a day that is no longer the same length, and the two viable terms are fossils of two earlier days.
Bearing on Volume I. Continuous with A 58 and A 64: the present arrangement of the heavens is a late stage of something that was once otherwise.
6 τίκτεται Diels, deleting νυκτί: the manuscripts read τίθεται νυκτί; Casaubon conjectured τίκτεται νυνί.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 75
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.