Diotimos Library · Greek Antiquity Collection · Bilingual Edition
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II
The Greek and Latin of Hermann Diels · New English translation and notes.
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English Introduction · Branch 6 of 126
Introduction · The Roots and the Powers
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Introduction
p. 6The roots and the powers
Four roots — fire, air, water, earth — and two powers that move them, Love and Strife. Nothing comes to be and nothing perishes; what changes is proportion and arrangement. That much is agreed by every witness in this book, and it is the doctrine for which Empedocles is remembered.
Three things about it are not agreed, and this edition does not conceal them.
The first is the divine names. Fragment 6 names the roots as Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis, and the ancient witnesses supply incompatible keys. Aëtius at A 33 makes Hera the air and Aidoneus the earth. The Homeric Allegories and Hippolytus, on the same page, reverse the pair; and Diogenes, summarising the doctrine at A 1 § 76, reverses it too. The modern handbooks follow Aëtius, who stands alone against three. Only Hippolytus argues his case, and his argument is good: air is Aidoneus, the unseen one, because we see all things through it and it alone we do not see. What is being followed today is a choice, not a consensus, and the notes say so wherever the question arises.
The second is the cycle. Simplicius states it symmetrically — a world formed under Love and a world formed under Strife, alternating without end — and quotes the poem for it. Aristotle says flatly that Empedocles passed over the world-formation under Love because it could not be made to work. Both witnesses are printed, and the question is open.
The third is mixture. Aristotle charges that on Empedocles' physics nothing is ever truly blended, only stacked side by side like a wall of bricks; the doxographers go further and credit him with particles smaller than the roots. The verse reads otherwise, and the reason it reads otherwise is the subject of the next section.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Introduction · The Roots and the Powers
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.