Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

The Byzantine summary: the golden girdle, the crater, the Wind-stopper

The Suda

Empedocles, son of Meton — others say of Archinomus, others of Exaenetus. He had a brother Callicratides. He first studied under Parmenides, whose beloved he became, as Porphyry says in his History of Philosophers. Others said that Empedocles was a pupil of Telauges the son of Pythagoras. He was a man of Acragas, a natural philosopher and an epic poet, and lived about the seventy-ninth Olympiad.

The Suda

With a golden wreath upon his head, and bronze shoes on his feet, and Delphic garlands in his hands, he went about the cities, wishing to secure the opinion that he was a god. When he had grown old he threw himself by night into a crater of fire, so that his body should not be found; and so he perished, his sandal having been cast up by the fire. He was also given the name Wind-stopper, because when a great wind was coming down upon Acragas he drove it off by putting asses' hides round the city. Gorgias the orator of Leontini was his pupil. And he wrote in verse two books On the Nature of Things — about two thousand lines — and Medical Writings in prose, and much else.

Late compilation, drawing on Hesychius and Porphyry.

A thousand years after the event, and everything has hardened. The four possible fathers of A 1 have become a list; the disputed leap into Etna has become the fact of the matter; the asses' hides, which Timaeus placed on the hills, now ring the city. But two details survive that are not in Diogenes at all: the poem was in two books, and it ran to about two thousand lines — a figure much closer to what the fragments suggest than the five thousand of A 1 § 77.

Bearing on Volume I. The two-book division of the Περὶ φύσεως, which Simplicius confirms by citing book numbers.

17 ὁ deleted by Diels: the manuscript VBE reads οὗτος ὁ Ἐ. — 25 the numeral is in the manuscripts; Demetrius Chalcondyles read "three." — 26 Ἰατρικά: the same work as the Ἰατρικὸς λόγος at A 1 § 77.