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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Perception and Thought · A 98
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 238Caelius Aurelianus, On Chronic Diseases
Empedoclem sequentes alium dicunt ex animi purgamento fieri, alium alienatione mentis ex corporis causa sive iniquitate, de quo nunc scripturi sumus; quem Graeci, siquidem magnam faciat anxietatem, adpellant μανίαν.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Perception and Thought
p. 239Two kinds of madness
Caelius Aurelianus, On Chronic Diseases
Those who follow Empedocles say that one kind of madness arises from a purification of the soul, and another from a derangement of the mind owing to a bodily cause or disorder — and it is the latter we are now about to write of; which the Greeks, when it produces great distress, call mania.
Report from a Latin medical writer, and the last of the doctrinal testimonia.
The A-testimonia end on the seam that runs through the whole of Empedocles. A physician writing in Latin, and interested only in the second kind, records that the school distinguished two madnesses: one with a bodily cause, which is a disease, and one that is a purification of the soul, which is not. The word he uses for it, purgamentum, is the Latin for katharmos — the title of the other poem. Whatever else divided the physics from the religion, the men who read both evidently did not think the division ran through the mind.
Bearing on Volume I. The one testimony that names the Purifications and the medical writings in a single sentence.
quam, in the manuscripts before adpellant, is deleted by Diels.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Perception and Thought · A 98
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.