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 33 of 126
The Life · A 4
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 56Aristotle, On the Soul
τῶν δὲ φορτικωτέρων καὶ ὕδωρ τινὲς ἀπεφήναντο καθάπερ Ἵππων· πεισθῆναι δ' ἐοίκασιν ἐκ τῆς γονῆς ὅτι πάντων ὑγρά· καὶ γὰρ ἐλέγχει τοὺς αἷμα φάσκοντας τὴν ψυχήν, ὅτι ἡ γονὴ οὐχ αἷμα.
The Suda, under "Zeno"
ἔγραψεν Ἔριδας, Ἐξήγησιν τῶν Ἐμπεδοκλέους, Πρὸς τοὺς φιλοσόφους περὶ φύσεως. — τοῦτόν φασιν εὑρετὴν εἶναι τῆς διαλεκτικῆς, ὡς Ἐμπεδοκλέα ῥητορικῆς.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: The Life
p. 57Hippo refutes the doctrine that the soul is blood
Aristotle, On the Soul
Among the coarser thinkers some declared it to be water, as Hippo did; and they seem to have been persuaded by the seed, because the seed of all creatures is moist. For Hippo also refutes those who say the soul is blood, on the ground that the seed is not blood.
Report in which Empedocles is the unnamed target.
The doctrine attacked is B 105, that thought is the blood about the heart, and the argument against it is a good one from a contemporary: if soul is blood, and the seed carries soul, the seed should be blood, and it is not. This is the earliest datable objection to anything Empedocles wrote, and it comes from inside the medical profession.
Bearing on Volume I. B 105.
3 Diels notes that Empedocles is certainly the man meant; compare Hippocrates, On Diseases I 30 and On the Sacred Disease 17.
Zeno wrote a commentary on him
The Suda, under "Zeno"
He wrote Disputes, an Exposition of the Poems of Empedocles, and Against the Philosophers, On Nature. — They say that he was the discoverer of dialectic, as Empedocles was of rhetoric.
Late catalogue entry, but the only record of a lost book.
If the attribution is sound, Zeno of Elea wrote a commentary on Empedocles within a generation of his death — the first commentary on a philosophical poem in Europe, and entirely lost. The pairing of the two inventions repeats what Aristotle says at A 1 § 57, and the repetition matters: two independent traditions put rhetoric and dialectic in the same generation, one in Sicily and one in Italy.
Compare A 1 § 57.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · The Life · A 4
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.