Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

INTRODUCTION

What is lost

Diogenes Laertius closes his Life with a figure. The On Nature and the Purifications together, he says, ran to five thousand lines, and a Medical Discourse to six hundred. The Byzantine lexicon we call the Suda gives a smaller count: two books, about two thousand lines. Diels thought Diogenes' figure too large and would have halved it. Volume I of this edition prints four hundred and eighty-four lines.

So between a quarter and a tenth of the verse survives, depending on which ancient count is believed, and that fraction is itself generous, because the four hundred and eighty-four lines are not four hundred and eighty-four consecutive lines. They are a hundred and fifty-four scraps, most of them one or two lines long, preserved because somebody quoted them in the course of arguing about something else.

This volume is the rest of the evidence. It is not Empedocles; it is the record of what other people said he said, and the distance between those two things is the whole reason the volume exists. Ninety-nine numbered testimonia, drawn from fifty-two authors writing across nine centuries in three languages, are printed here complete, with the Greek and Latin that Diels established and a new English translation facing it.

The proper attitude to this material is neither credulity nor dismissal. A doxographer's single sentence and a page of Aristotle arguing with a text in front of him are both evidence, and they are not evidence of the same kind or the same weight. Most of the work of editing a collection like this consists in keeping that difference visible.