Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

The verdict of the handbooks

Lactantius, Divine Institutes

Empedocles — whom you would not know whether to count among the poets or among the philosophers, since he wrote about the nature of things in verse, as Lucretius and Varro did among the Romans — laid down four elements.

Scholiast on Dionysius Thrax

We do not, of course, call Empedocles a poet, or Tyrtaeus, or those who have written about astronomy, even though they used metre — because they did not employ the things that mark out poets. — A man is not a poet merely by using metre; neither Empedocles, who wrote the Physics, nor those who have written on astronomy, nor the Pythian god delivering his oracles in verse.

Aristotle, Rhetoric

Men of this kind talk so in their poetry — Empedocles, for instance. For a long circuit of words cheats the hearer, and his audience is affected as most people are by soothsayers: when they speak ambiguously, the hearers nod along with them.

Aristotle, Meteorology

It is equally absurd if a man, having said that the sea is the sweat of the earth, supposes he has said something clear — as Empedocles does. For poetry, put that way, he has perhaps said enough, since metaphor is a poetic thing; but for knowing the nature of a thing, he has not.