Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

HOW TO READ THIS VOLUME

Nothing in this book is Empedocles' own words. Volume I holds those. What stands here is what other people said he said — and the distance between those two things is the whole reason for the volume.

The witnesses are not of equal weight, and the first thing to know is how they differ.

Aristotle wrote roughly a century after Empedocles died, with the poem in front of him, and argued with it directly. He is the best witness we have and the most treacherous, because he restates Empedocles in his own vocabulary as he goes. Where he writes elements, Empedocles wrote roots. Where he speaks of matter, Empedocles had no such category. His reports and his objections run together in the same sentence, and the notes here mark the seam wherever it falls. Two works printed under his name are not his: the Problems at A 69 and On Breath at A 78 are school compilations, and are marked Pseudo-Aristotle throughout.

Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, wrote the first history of a philosophical problem that anyone wrote, and almost everything later is downstream of him. The third part of this volume is his chapter on Empedocles entire.

Aëtius is a different order of evidence again — and he is, strictly, a reconstruction. No manuscript of Aëtius survives. Diels assembled him in 1879 out of two later compilations that plainly drew on a common source, and the name is his hypothesis. What we read as an Aëtius notice is therefore a modern reconstruction of a lost epitome of a lost handbook that itself compressed Theophrastus. It is often a single sentence, stripped of argument. It should never be weighed against Aristotle as though the two were the same kind of thing.

Simplicius wrote in the sixth century AD and still had substantial portions of the poem; he quotes at length and cites book numbers. He is invaluable, and he is a Neoplatonist reading a Presocratic, which shows.

Hippolytus, Plutarch, Philo, Galen, Soranus, Censorinus, Seneca and the rest each had their own reasons for mentioning Empedocles — apologetic, medical, astronomical, polemical — and those reasons shaped what they preserved. At the far end of the range stands On Plants, quoted at A 70, which reached Latin through Syriac and Arabic and calls Empedocles by a name no Greek would recognise.

Where a Diels number gathers more than one witness — and more than half of them do — each witness is named above its own text on both pages of the opening, in the same words and the same order, so that it is never necessary to look across to learn who is speaking. Where the witnesses on one number are of unequal worth, the note says so.

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

A last caution. Several of the doctrines below appear in no surviving verse at all. That the roots lose their distinctness inside the Sphairos; that the heaven is frozen air; that there are two suns; that the cosmos is egg-shaped — for all of these, the testimony is the only evidence there is. They may be perfectly good report. They may also be later doctrine that drifted onto a famous name. Where a claim stands alone, the note says so.