Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

The roots are prior to the god; Love separates as well as joins

Aristotle, De generatione et corruptione B 6, 333b20

And yet the elements are separated not by Strife but by Love, since they are by nature prior to the god; and they too are gods.

Criticism, and a report of two doctrines.

Dense and important. "the god" is the Sphairos; Aristotle's point is that the roots must be prior to it, since it is composed of them. The clause "they too are gods" reports Empedocles' own view (cf. A32) and is not Aristotle's. That the roots are gods and the Sphairos a god is the metaphysical difficulty at the centre of the system, and Aristotle states it in one line without developing it.

The Sphairos as without quality; the charge of self-contradiction.

Philoponus, In De generatione et corruptione 19,3 Vitelli

For he speaks against the appearances, denying that alteration is manifest, though it plainly is; and against himself, because on the one hand he says the elements are unchangeable, and that they do not come to be out of one another but everything else out of them; while on the other he says that when Love prevails all things become one and produce the Sphairos, which is without quality, so that no longer is the property of fire, or of any of the others, preserved in it, each of the elements casting off its own proper form.

Criticism, carrying a report that is found nowhere in the verse.

The claim that the roots lose their distinctness in the Sphairos survives only here and in A32. No fragment says it. Yet it is the crux of the whole system: if the roots keep their identity in the Sphairos, the Sphairos is a mixture; if they lose it, then the roots are not after all unchangeable, which is what Philoponus is objecting. A reader of the poems alone would not know the question had been raised.