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 Page · Branch 19 of 126
The Life · A 1 §§ 56–58 (continued)
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 28Diogenes Laertius VIII 58
καθόλου δέ φησι καὶ τραγωιδίας αὐτὸν γράψαι καὶ πολιτικούς· Ἡρακλείδης δὲ ὁ τοῦ Σαραπίωνος ἑτέρου φησὶν εἶναι τὰς τραγωιδίας. Ἱερώνυμος δὲ τρισὶ καὶ τετταράκοντά φησιν ἐντετυχηκέναι, Νεάνθης δὲ νέον ὄντα γεγραφέναι τὰς τραγωιδίας καὶ αὐτῶν ἑπτὰ ἐντετυχηκέναι. φησὶ δὲ Σάτυρος ἐν τοῖς Βίοις, ὅτι καὶ ἰατρὸς ἦν καὶ ῥήτωρ ἄριστος. Γοργίαν γοῦν τὸν Λεοντῖνον αὐτοῦ γενέσθαι μαθητήν, ἄνδρα ὑπερέχοντα ἐν ῥητορικῆι καὶ τέχνην ἀπολελοιπότα· ὅν φησιν Ἀπολλόδωρος ἐν Χρονικοῖς ἐννέα πρὸς τοῖς ἑκατὸν ἔτη βιῶναι.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: The Life
p. 29Diogenes Laertius VIII 58
In general he says that Empedocles wrote tragedies as well, and political speeches. Heraclides the son of Sarapion says the tragedies are by another man. Hieronymus says he came upon forty-three of them; Neanthes, that Empedocles wrote the tragedies as a young man, and that he had come upon seven. Satyrus says in his Lives that he was also a physician and a first-rate orator: Gorgias of Leontini at any rate was his pupil, a man supreme in rhetoric who left a treatise behind him — and Apollodorus says in his Chronicles that Gorgias lived a hundred and nine years.
Biography, with Aristotle twice as the source.
Two claims here are usually passed over too quickly. That Empedocles invented rhetoric is Aristotle's, not a late fancy, and it is made in the same breath as the claim that Zeno invented dialectic — a pairing which says that the two arts were felt to arrive together, out of the same generation and the same part of the Greek world. And Gorgias was his pupil: the man who taught Greece that language could be made to do anything learnt it from a hexameter poet in Sicily. The burnt poems are the one place where we can see what has been lost as a definite thing rather than a general loss.
14 μεταφορητικός in BP: μεταφορικός in P²F; Aristotle in any case wrote the latter. — 21 αὐτῶν ἑπτά Diels: αὐτὸν ἔπειτα in the manuscripts.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · The Life · A 1 §§ 56–58 (continued)
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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.