Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

The chain

Most of the doctrinal testimonia in this book descend from one book, and it is worth knowing how.

Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, wrote a work on the opinions of the natural philosophers and a separate one On the Senses. He had the poems. From his survey there descended a series of epitomes, each shorter than the last, and from those an anonymous handbook of philosophical opinions arranged by topic. That handbook is lost. What survives are two later compilations which plainly drew on it: a treatise on the opinions of the philosophers that circulated under Plutarch's name and is not his, and the anthology of Stobaeus.

In 1879 Diels compared the two, reconstructed their common source, and gave it the name Aëtius, which he took from a passing reference in Theodoret. That reconstruction has stood, and it is one of the great feats of nineteenth-century scholarship. But its status should be stated plainly, because this volume prints more testimonia from Aëtius than from anyone else. An Aëtius notice is a modern reconstruction of a lost epitome of a lost handbook which itself compressed Theophrastus, who was reading the poem. There are four removes between the reader and the verse, and each of them removed argument and kept conclusions.

That is why the same doctrine so often arrives as a single stripped sentence. It is also why, at A 61, the two branches of the tradition give flatly contradictory figures for the distance of the moon, and Diels judged that neither preserves what Empedocles wrote. The numeral survived; the terms it related did not.

Against this, Theophrastus himself survives entire on one subject. His chapter on Empedocles' theory of perception is printed here as A 86, and it is the most valuable document in the volume.

The longest chain of all runs through A 70, where a treatise On Plants by Nicolaus of Damascus passed from Greek into Syriac, from Syriac into Arabic, from Arabic into Latin, and calls Empedocles by a name no Greek would recognise: Abrucalis. What it reports — that plants desire, perceive, feel pleasure and pain, and have sex — is exactly what the Greek notice on the same page says, and what fragment B 79 says in verse. The two ends of the chain agree. Only the middle is illegible, and that is a useful thing to know about chains.