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 3 of 126
Introduction · What a Testimonium Is
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Introduction
p. 2What a testimonium is
A fragment is a quotation. A testimonium is a report, and a report has an author, a purpose, and a date, all of which shape what it preserves.
Consider what happens to one doctrine across this book. Empedocles held that the sea is what the earth gave off under pressure. At A 66 the phrase survives in Aëtius as "the sweat of the earth," which has the ring of the verse. At A 25 Aristotle quotes the same phrase to complain that a metaphor is not an explanation — "for poetry, put that way, he has perhaps said enough; but for knowing the nature of a thing, he has not." And at A 66 again, Philo describes the same process at length in a Latin translation of an Armenian version of a lost Greek original, and calls it muddy water. Three witnesses, three distances, one doctrine, and only the middle one tells us what the words were for.
Or consider A 14, where four authors report that Empedocles stopped a wind. Plutarch, twice, describes an engineering work: a cleft in a hillside walled off so that a sickly wind no longer reached the plain, with the fall in disease that would follow. Clement has the deed but not the wall. Nicomachus has only the epithet, Averter of Winds, and files it beside a man who walked on air. The plainest version is the earliest, and the sequence from Plutarch to Nicomachus is the history of a legend in four steps.
The reader will find this pattern everywhere, and it is the reason the notes below each entry say who is speaking and why, rather than simply reporting what was said.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Introduction · What a Testimonium Is
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.