Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

The man

The Life occupies the first part of this volume, and it is a compilation rather than a biography. Its value lies in Diogenes' habit of naming his authorities and letting them contradict one another: six of them in the first twelve lines, four different names for the father, three ages at death, and five separate accounts of how he died.

Where Diogenes adjudicates, he does it on evidence. The chronology still in use rests on an argument of Apollodorus reported at A 1 § 52: an Olympic victory recorded for "Empedocles" in 496 BC must belong to the grandfather, since the philosopher's own death at sixty — the figure Aristotle gives — would otherwise make him impossibly old. A birth around 492 follows, and nothing since has dislodged it.

What the Life supports, beyond the dates, is a man of a particular and consistent kind. He was rich, of a house that kept racehorses. He refused a crown, on Aristotle's authority. His politics were levelling: a tyranny stopped at a dinner party, a celebrated physician refused a family monument on grounds of equality, an oligarchy of the Thousand dissolved. He dowered the daughters of citizens who had nothing. He wore purple, a golden girdle, bronze shoes and a Delphic wreath, and four unconnected witnesses say so. He was a working physician whom Galen lists, with his pupil Pausanias, as one of the medical traditions of Italy, beside Cos and Cnidus. He diverted two rivers at his own expense to end a plague at Selinus. And he sacrificed an ox made of honey and barley-meal, or of spices, because he held that killing was murder and still had to make a public offering.

Timaeus of Tauromenium, the best historian in the collection, thought the man of the poems and the man of the assembly did not match — moderate and decent in one, boastful and self-loving in the other. It is at least as likely that a man who believed he had escaped the cycle of birth would take no interest in rank, and that the two are one position seen from two sides.

Timaeus is also the author of the finest piece of source criticism in the ancient literature on Empedocles. At A 1 §§ 71 and 72 he takes apart the story of the leap into Etna with arguments any modern historian would make: the host's estate was in the wrong city; Pausanias, who supposedly witnessed a deification, put up no monument and could easily have afforded one; and Empedocles, who wrote at length about fire, never once mentions the volcano. Diogenes prints the demolition alongside the story. The appendix to this volume traces what happened next, which is that the demolition made no difference at all.