Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

Censorinus, On the Birthday

Next, concerning twins. Hippon held that they are sometimes born by reason of the quantity of the seed: for when it is more than was enough for one, it is drawn off two ways. Empedocles seems to have thought almost the same; for he did not set down the causes why it should divide, but only says that it divides — and that if both portions take up places equally hot, both are born male; if equally cold, both female; but if one is hotter and the other colder, the birth will be of different sexes.

Report from nine notices of unequal worth.

Nine separate notices stand behind this one number, and they do not all deserve the same credit. Aristotle is arguing with a text in front of him and quotes a real doctrine, then reproaches Empedocles for holding it carelessly. The Aëtius notices are handbook summaries, and the fourth of them contains the doxographer's own verdict rather than Empedocles' words — that he anticipated nearly every later explanation of monstrous birth, which is a compliment paid to a list. The last notice, on the woman's imagination shaping the child, had an extraordinarily long life: it is still being repeated, with Empedocles' name attached, in the medical literature of the seventeenth century.

Bearing on Volume I. Sex determined by temperature, and the first men and women generated in different latitudes — the embryology and the zoogony are one doctrine.

32 ταραχήν G: ἀρχήν in (A)BC. — 34 αἰτιολογίας Reiske: ἀπολογίας in (A)BC. Compare Hippocrates, On Seed 8; Soranus p. 204, 18 Rose; ps.-Galen XIV 253; Dionysius, On Imitation p. 17, 18 Usener. — Censorinus 3 Empedoclis Diels: enpedocles in the manuscripts; talia profatur Lachmann. — 5 frigus Carrio: frigidus in the manuscripts. — 9 ⟨est⟩ Carrio. — Of the passage on twins Diels notes that it can hardly derive from Empedocles himself.