Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

APPENDIX II: AFTER ANTIQUITY

The man of the crater

Diels stops where antiquity stops, and so does the Loeb. But Empedocles did not stop being read, and what happened to him afterwards is worth setting down, because it is a case of a reputation being decided by the one part of the evidence that the best ancient historian had already disproved.

Timaeus demolished the leap into Etna at A 1 §§ 71 and 72, and he did it with arguments a modern historian would make: the host's estate was in the wrong city, the friend who supposedly witnessed a deification put up no monument and could easily afford one, and Empedocles, who wrote at length about fire, never once mentions the volcano. Diogenes Laertius prints the demolition. It made no difference. Four of the five witnesses below know Empedocles chiefly as the man who jumped, and the fifth knows him for a doctrine he met only in a refutation.

Dante, Inferno IV 135–138

The philosophers of Limbo

che innanzi agli altri più presso gli stanno;

Democrito, che il mondo a caso pone,

Dïogenès, Anassagora e Tale,

Empedoclès, Eraclito e Zenone;

who stand before the others and nearest to him: Democritus, who sets the world down to chance; Diogenes, Anaxagoras and Thales; Empedocles, Heraclitus and Zeno.

The virtuous pagans, in the castle of the noble spirits, ranked around Aristotle. Dante's commentators gloss the name as "of Acragas, author of a poem on nature and on the first principles of things," which is exactly right and suggests the fourteenth century still knew what he had written, if not the writing.

Dante, Inferno XII 40–43

An earthquake, and a doctrine

da tutte parti l'alta valle feda

tremò sì, ch'io pensai che l'universo

sentisse amor, per lo qual è chi creda

più volte il mondo in caos converso;

on every side the deep foul valley shook so that I thought the universe felt love — through which, as some believe, the world has more than once been turned back into chaos.

This is the more interesting of the two, because it is doctrine and not a name. The trembling of Hell at the Crucifixion reminds Dante of the theory that when Love prevails the elements are drawn back together into an undifferentiated mass. That is the Sphairos of B 27 and A 41, and Dante has it right. His commentators note that he can only have met it in Aristotle, who reports the doctrine in order to refute it — so the one piece of Empedoclean physics to reach the Commedia travelled there inside its own refutation.

John Milton, Paradise Lost III 469–473

The Paradise of Fools

Others came single; he, who to be deemed

A god, leaped fondly into Ætna flames,

Empedocles; and he who, to enjoy

Plato's Elysium, leaped into the sea,

Cleombrotus; and many more too long,

Blown, with the friars and the relics and the indulgences, into the Limbo of Vanity on the backside of the world. Milton has taken the story from Horace at A 16 and kept Horace's verdict in the single word fondly — foolishly, from vanity. What has been lost between Diogenes and Milton is that anyone ever doubted it; the leap is now simply what Empedocles did, and the reason for it is simply what Hippobotus said it was.

Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna II 402–416

The last speech, 1852

And therefore, O ye elements, I know—

Ye know it too—it hath been granted me

Not to die wholly, not to be all enslav'd.

I feel it in this hour! The numbing cloud

Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free!

Is it but for a moment?

Ah! boil up, ye vapours!

Leap and roar, thou sea of fire!

My soul glows to meet you.

Ere it flag, ere the mists

Of despondency and gloom

Rush over it again,

Receive me! Save me! [He plunges into the crater.

Arnold's Empedocles is a modern man, isolated by his own intelligence, and the crater is a release rather than a fraud — the exact inversion of Hippobotus, who made the leap a bid for a reputation, and of Milton, who made it vanity. Arnold kept Pausanias, who is in the poem from its first scene, and kept the physician too; what he could not keep was the physics, and the speech turns on a word — elements — that has quietly changed meaning since B 6. He withdrew the poem from his collected edition in 1853 on the ground that it depicted a suffering that found no vent in action, and restored it only in 1867 at Browning's urging.

Two things follow from this sequence. The first is that the modern Empedocles descends from Hippobotus, a late compiler, by way of Horace's joke, and not from Timaeus, who examined the evidence — and that a reputation, once it has found a good story, is not much affected by being refuted. The second is that the part of him which survived is the part this volume can do least with. Hölderlin left three drafts of a Tod des Empedokles and finished none, Nietzsche planned a drama and abandoned it, and both were working on the crater. Nothing of that is testimony, and so nothing of it is printed here beyond this notice; but a reader who wonders why the name is famous while the doctrine is not will find the answer in the four pages above.