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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Facing Pages · Branch 123 of 126
Perception and Thought · A 96
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 236Aëtius
Παρμενίδης καὶ Ἐ. καὶ Δημόκριτος ταὐτὸν νοῦν καὶ ψυχήν, καθ' οὓς οὐδὲν ἂν εἴη ζῶιον ἄλογον κυρίως.
Aëtius
Ἐ. ἐν τῆι τοῦ αἵματος συστάσει.
Theodoret, Cure of the Greek Maladies
Ἐ. … τὴν καρδίαν ἀπεκλήρωσαν τούτωι. καὶ τούτων δ' αὖ πάλιν οἱ μὲν ἐν τῆι κοιλίαι τῆς καρδίας, οἱ δὲ ἐν τῶι αἵματι.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Perception and Thought
p. 237Mind and soul are the same, so no animal is irrational
Aëtius
Parmenides and Empedocles and Democritus: mind and soul are the same — on their view, no animal would be irrational in the strict sense.
Doxographic report, one sentence with a large consequence.
The consequence is drawn by the doxographer, not by Empedocles, but it follows from what he says elsewhere and he would not have resisted it. If thinking is a property of a blend, and every animal has a blend, then every animal thinks in its degree. The Purifications, where the wanderer passes into the body of a beast and a bush, requires exactly this.
Bearing on Volume I. The physics behind the transmigration of B 117 and B 127.
Where the governing part is
Aëtius
Empedocles: [the governing part is] in the composition of the blood.
Theodoret, Cure of the Greek Maladies
Empedocles … they assigned the heart to it. And among these again, some place it in the cavity of the heart, others in the blood.
Doxographic report, with a Christian witness added.
Theodoret has preserved the disagreement rather than resolving it, which makes him useful here. B 105 says the blood about the heart, and both halves of that phrase were being pulled at by readers who wanted a single organ.
Bearing on Volume I. B 105.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Perception and Thought · A 96
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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.