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 13 of 126
How to Read This Volume · What Is in This Volume
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: How to Read This Volume
p. 12WHAT IS IN THIS VOLUME
The Life (A 1 – A 25): Diogenes Laertius' Life entire, and the testimonia on the man — dates, teachers, politics, medicine, dress, the competing accounts of his death, and the question whether he was a poet.
The Doctrine: Principles, Cosmos and Cycle (A 26 – A 56): the roots, the two powers, mixture, the Sphairos, the cycle, and the making of the world.
The Doctrine, continued: Light, Sea, Plants and the Making of Bodies (A 57 – A 85): light, the heavens, weather, the sea, plants, the four generations of living things, and the physiology of the body.
Perception and Thought (A 86 – A 98): Theophrastus on how Empedocles thought seeing, hearing, smelling and thinking work, and thirteen sections taking the account apart; then pores, effluences, the lodestone, colour, appetite, and the soul.
Each part opens with a fuller note on what stands in it and what is disputed there.
Two parts remain to be added: a reception appendix, and the introduction, which will be written last.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · How to Read This Volume · What Is in This Volume
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.