Diotimos Library · Greek Antiquity Collection · Bilingual Edition
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II
The Greek and Latin of Hermann Diels · New English translation and notes.
Explore the LexiconSwipe or use the arrow keys.
Facing Pages · Branch 38 of 126
The Life · A 15
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 66Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras
Ἐ. δὲ σπασαμένου τὸ ξίφος ἤδη νεανίου τινὸς ἐπὶ τὸν αὑτοῦ ξενοδόχον Ἄγχιτον, ἐπεὶ δικάσας δημοσίαι τὸν τοῦ νεανίου πατέρα ἐθανάτωσε, καὶ ἀίξαντος, ὡς εἶχε συγχύσεως καὶ θυμοῦ, ξιφήρους παῖσαι τὸν τοῦ πατρὸς καταδικαστὴν ὡσανεὶ φονέα Ἄγχιτον, μεθαρμοσάμενος ὡς εἶχε τὴν λύραν καὶ πεπαντικόν τι μέλος καὶ κατασταλτικὸν μεταχειρισάμενος εὐθὺς ἀνεκρούσατο τὸ νηπενθές τε ἄχολόν τε κακῶν ἐπίληθες ἁπάντων κατὰ τὸν ποιητήν, καὶ τόν τε ἑαυτοῦ ξενοδόχον Ἄγχιτον θανάτου ἐρρύσατο καὶ τὸν νεανίαν ἀνδροφονίας. ἱστορεῖται δ' οὗτος τῶν Ἐμπεδοκλέους γνωρίμων ὁ δοκιμώτατος ἔκτοτε γενέσθαι.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: The Life
p. 67The lyre, the drawn sword, and the name of Pausanias
Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras
When a young man had already drawn his sword against Anchitos, Empedocles' host — because Anchitos, sitting as a public judge, had condemned the young man's father to death — and was rushing at him, sword in hand, in all his confusion and rage, to strike down the man who had sentenced his father as though he were his murderer, Empedocles retuned the lyre he was holding, took up a soothing and settling melody, and struck up at once the strain that is, in the poet's words, "without grief, without anger, a forgetting of all ills." And so he saved his host Anchitos from death and the young man from becoming a murderer. And this young man is recorded to have become, from that time, the most distinguished of Empedocles' companions.
Anecdote from a Neoplatonist Life, with a textual accident inside it.
Diels's observation turns a piece of Pythagorean edification into something better. B 1 opens the On Nature by addressing "Pausanias, son of wise Anchitos" — so the host and the avenger have been confused, and the youth here is the pupil to whom the whole poem is dedicated, and the beloved of A 1 § 60. What survives, then, is a story about how Empedocles and Pausanias met: a courtroom killing, a drawn sword, and a man who stopped it by changing the tuning of a lyre.
Bearing on Volume I. B 1, where Pausanias is named son of Anchitos.
The quotation is Homer, Odyssey IV 221. Diels notes that the young man is certainly Pausanias, the son of Anchitos, whose name has been transferred by mistake to the host.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · The Life · A 15
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.