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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Ancient Greek and Latin Page · Branch 36 of 126
The Life · A 11–A 12
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 62Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters
Ἐ. δ' ὁ Ἀκραγαντῖνος ἵπποις Ὀλύμπια νικήσας Πυθαγορικὸς ὢν καὶ ἐμψύχων ἀπεχόμενος ἐκ σμύρνης καὶ λιβανωτοῦ καὶ τῶν πολυτελεστάτων ἀρωμάτων βοῦν ἀναπλάσας διένειμε τοῖς εἰς τὴν πανήγυριν ἀπαντήσασιν.
Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters
τοὺς δ' Ἐμπεδοκλέους Καθαρμοὺς ἐραψώιδησεν Ὀλυμπίασι Κλεομένης ὁ ῥαψωιδός, ὥς φησιν Δικαίαρχος ἐν τῶι Ὀλυμπικῶι.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: The Life
p. 63The ox of spices, and the Purifications recited at Olympia
Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters
Empedocles of Acragas, when he had won the Olympic victory with horses, being a Pythagorean and abstaining from living things, moulded an ox out of myrrh and frankincense and the costliest spices, and distributed it to those who had come to the festival.
Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters
The Purifications of Empedocles were recited at Olympia by Cleomenes the rhapsode, as Dicaearchus says in his Olympic Discourse.
Two notices from Athenaeus, the second from a pupil of Aristotle.
The bloodless ox appears at A 1 § 53 too, made there of honey and barley-meal rather than spices — a discrepancy that suggests the story is older than either version. The second notice is the more valuable: Dicaearchus was Aristotle's pupil, and he records that the Purifications were performed at Olympia by a professional reciter. The poem was not a private document but a public performance, delivered where the whole Greek world could hear it.
Bearing on Volume I. The occasion B 112 seems to imagine.
Either the grandfather's victory or the son's has here been transferred to Empedocles himself; compare A 1 §§ 51 and 53.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · The Life · A 11–A 12
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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.