Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

THE LIFE

Diogenes Laertius, and the Testimonia on the Man

Diels-Kranz 31 A 1 – A 25

The man: his family and dates, his teachers, his politics, his medicine, his dress, the four or five accounts of his death, and the ancient argument over whether what he wrote was poetry.

A 1 is not a notice but a book — the whole of Diogenes Laertius' Life, and a compilation rather than a biography. Its value is that Diogenes names his authorities and lets them disagree: six of them in the first twelve lines, four different names for the father, three ages at death, and five deaths. Where he adjudicates, he does it on evidence, and the chronology he takes from Apollodorus still stands.

The best thing in it is at §§ 71 and 72, where Timaeus of Tauromenium takes apart the story of the leap into Etna 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 well afford one, and Empedocles, who wrote at length about fire, never once mentions the volcano. The story survives anyway, because it is a good ending, and by Horace's time it had become a joke in a handbook of literary manners.

What is not in dispute is smaller and more interesting: the purple robe and bronze shoes, attested by four unconnected witnesses; the bloodless ox of honey or of spices, sacrificed by a man who held that killing was murder; the hides or the wall that stopped a sickly wind, and the two rivers he diverted at his own expense to end a plague at Selinus; and the tally at § 77, which says the two poems ran to five thousand lines. Volume I of this edition prints four hundred and eighty-four.