Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

The sorcerer, the wind-stopper, and the woman who did not breathe

Diogenes Laertius VIII 59

Satyrus says that Gorgias used to say he had himself been present when Empedocles was working sorcery; and that Empedocles professed this and much besides in his poems, where he says: "drugs … of a man."

Diogenes Laertius VIII 60

Timaeus says in his eighteenth book that the man was marvelled at in many ways. Once, when the Etesian winds blew so violently as to ruin the crops, he ordered asses to be flayed and bags made of the hides, and stretched them about the hills and headlands to catch the wind; and when it dropped he was called Wind-stopper. Heraclides says in his On Diseases that he also instructed Pausanias in the case of the woman who did not breathe. Pausanias, as Aristippus and Satyrus say, was his beloved — the man to whom he dedicated the On Nature in these words: "Pausanias …"

Biography; the point where the Life turns toward the marvellous.

The wind-stopping is the best-attested of the marvels, and it has a rational shape under the legend: hides strung across a mountain pass are a windbreak, and the epithet the town gave him is the sort of thing a town gives a man who has actually done something. The woman who did not breathe belongs with A 74 and B 100 — a case of suspended respiration, taught to a pupil as a case, which is what a physician does. B 111, quoted here, is the fragment where Empedocles promises control of wind and rain and the raising of the dead, so the biographers were not inventing the claim; they were repeating it.

Bearing on Volume I. B 1 dedicates the poem to Pausanias; B 111 promises the powers this section illustrates.

29 ἦν corrected by Beloch; the manuscripts of Diogenes read ὡς ἂν. — 32 Κωλυσανέμου, the form in the Suda. The quotations are fragments B 111 and B 1.