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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Facing Pages · Branch 35 of 126
The Life · A 8–A 10
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 60Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel
Τηλαύγους δὲ Ἐ. ἀκουστὴς γίνεται, καθ' ὃν Ἡράκλειτος ὁ σκοτεινὸς ἐγνωρίζετο.
Eusebius, Chronicle
Ἐ. καὶ Παρμενίδης φυσικοὶ φιλόσοφοι ἐγνωρίζοντο.
Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
iuxta ea tempora E. Agrigentinus in philosophiae naturalis studio floruit.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: The Life
p. 61The dates: three chronicles that do not agree
Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel
Empedocles becomes a pupil of Telauges, in whose time Heraclitus the Obscure was well known.
Eusebius, Chronicle
Empedocles and Parmenides, natural philosophers, were well known. [At the eighty-first Olympiad, 456 BC; and again at the eighty-sixth, 436 BC.]
Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
About that time Empedocles of Acragas flourished in the study of natural philosophy.
Chronological notices, ranging over seventy years.
Three chronicles put his prime at, respectively, about 504, 456 and 436 BC. The spread is nearly seventy years, and it shows what ancient chronology was worth when it had nothing to anchor to. Only Apollodorus at A 1 § 52 had an anchor — the Olympic victory of the grandfather — and his date, a birth around 492, is the one that has held.
The Gellius notice, probably from Cornelius Nepos' chronicle, falls between the battle at the Cremera (477 BC) and the Decemvirate (450 BC).
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · The Life · A 8–A 10
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.