Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

This edition

The Greek and Latin are Diels's, from the third edition of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1912), which is in the public domain. They have been read from the page images themselves rather than from any digital transcription, because the automated text of a polytonic page cannot be trusted. Every translation is new and independent; no modern translation has been consulted.

Where a Diels number gathers more than one witness — and well over half of them do; A 81 carries nine — each witness is named above its own text on both pages of every opening, in the same words and the same order, so that a reader never has to look across to learn who is speaking. Where the witnesses on one number are not of the same standing, the note says which is which.

Square brackets in the Greek mark words Diels deleted; angle brackets mark words he supplied. The apparatus in small type records only those readings that bear on the sense of the translation, and gives them in English rather than in the Latin of the critical tradition.

Two numbers are long enough to be books in themselves — A 1, the Life, and A 86, the chapter of Theophrastus — and each is printed in editorial groups, so that the commentary stands beside the section it discusses. The section numbers within them are the ancient ones and run unbroken; the groupings are this edition's.

The order is Diels's throughout, which is not thematic and is sometimes inconvenient. It has been kept because a reader who wants to check this book against another edition, or against Diels himself, should be able to do so without a concordance.

Finally: this is a volume of disagreements, and a reader who finds them irritating has understood the material. Nothing here is Empedocles' own voice. What is here is fifty-two people, most of whom never met, arguing across nine centuries about a man whose book they had and we do not.