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 90 of 126
Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 77
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 170Aëtius
Ἐ. τρέφεσθαι μὲν τὰ ζῶια διὰ τὴν ὑπόστασιν τοῦ οἰκείου, αὔξεσθαι δὲ διὰ τὴν παρουσίαν τοῦ θερμοῦ, μειοῦσθαι δὲ καὶ φθίνειν διὰ τὴν ἔκλειψιν ἑκατέρων. τοὺς δὲ νῦν ἀνθρώπους τοῖς πρώτοις συμβαλλομένους βρεφῶν ἐπέχειν τάξιν.
Pseudo-Galen, Medical Definitions
πῶς Ἱπποκράτης καὶ Ἐρασίστρατος καὶ Ἐ. καὶ Ἀσκληπιάδης τὰς πέψεις τῆς τροφῆς φασι γίνεσθαι … Ἐ. δὲ σήψει.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 171Nourishment, growth, and digestion
Aëtius
Empedocles: living things are nourished by the settling in of what is akin to them, grow by the presence of heat, and are diminished and waste away by the failing of both. And men as they now are, set beside the first men, hold the rank of infants.
Pseudo-Galen, Medical Definitions
How do Hippocrates and Erasistratus and Empedocles and Asclepiades say that the digestion of food comes about? … Empedocles: by putrefaction.
Doxographic report, with a medical handbook echo.
The last sentence is the striking one and it is easy to read past. Present-day men, measured against the first, are infants — not fallen, not degenerate, but immature. Taken with A 72 and A 75 it gives a cosmos still in the middle of its growth, in which the human race is younger than it looks.
17 οἰκείου] compare πρόσφορον at p. 212, 19; Diels suggests ὑγροῦ. Compare fragments B 68 and B 81.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 77
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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.