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 7 of 126
Introduction · Bone Is a Ratio
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Introduction
p. 6Bone is a ratio
A 78 is the most important doctrinal testimony in this volume, and its importance is in Aristotle's sentence rather than in the figures around it.
Empedocles was asked what bone is. He did not answer that it is earth, or fire, or a mixture of all four. He answered that it is a proportion: two parts of one thing, four of another, blended in a fixed ratio, and it is that ratio which makes the stuff bone rather than flesh. Aristotle, who disagrees with nearly everything else in this book, records the doctrine and concedes that on this point Empedocles was "led by the truth itself."
The claim is that what makes a thing the thing it is, is a number. Set beside it the charge about bricks, and the charge dissolves: a wall of bricks has no ratio, and a thing defined by ratio is not a wall of bricks. Set beside it the fragments, where the ratio for bone is given in verse, and the testimony and the poem turn out to be saying one thing in two registers.
Aristotle then turns the doctrine against itself, in a passage printed on the same opening. If the soul is the ratio of a mixture, and flesh and bone have different ratios, then a body must have as many souls as it has kinds of tissue. Theophrastus presses the same point harder at A 86 § 23: bone and hair are made of the elements too, so bone and hair should perceive. Neither objection is answered anywhere in the surviving material.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Introduction · Bone Is a Ratio
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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.