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 Introduction · Branch 10 of 126
Introduction · Aristotle’s Shadow
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Introduction
p. 8Aristotle's shadow
A reader should finish this book with one suspicion firmly in place: a great deal of what we think we know about Empedocles is in Aristotle's vocabulary.
Empedocles wrote rhizōmata, roots — a live metaphor, of things from which growth proceeds. Aristotle writes stoicheia, elements, a term from his own analysis, and it is through Aristotle that the four elements entered European thought with Empedocles' name attached. He speaks of matter and form in reporting a man who had neither word. He attributes to Empedocles the position of a philosopher who has taken a view about archai, first principles, in a debate Aristotle himself organised.
None of this is dishonesty. It is what happens when a systematic thinker reports an unsystematic predecessor, and Aristotle is still the best witness we have precisely because he is arguing rather than cataloguing. But his reports and his objections run together in the same sentence, and the notes in this volume mark the seam wherever it can be found.
Two works printed under his name are not his. The Problems at A 69 and On Breath at A 78 are compilations of his school, and are marked Pseudo-Aristotle throughout.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Introduction · Aristotle’s Shadow
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.