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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Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 57
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 132Aristotle, On the Soul
οὐκ ὀρθῶς Ἐ. οὐδ' εἴ τις ἄλλος οὕτως εἴρηκεν, ὡς φερομένου τοῦ φωτὸς καὶ γιγνομένου ποτὲ μεταξὺ τῆς γῆς καὶ τοῦ περιέχοντος, ἡμᾶς δὲ λανθάνοντος … ἐν μικρῶι μὲν γὰρ διαστήματι λάθοι ἄν, ἀπ' ἀνατολῆς δ' ἐπὶ δυσμὰς τὸ λανθάνειν μέγα λίαν τὸ αἴτημα.
Aristotle, On Sense and Sense-Objects
καθάπερ καὶ Ἐ. φησιν ἀφικνεῖσθαι πρότερον τὸ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου φῶς εἰς τὸ μεταξύ, πρὶν πρὸς τὴν ὄψιν ἢ ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν.
Philoponus, On Aristotle's On the Soul
Ἐ. ὃς ἔλεγεν ἀπορρέον τὸ φῶς σῶμα ὂν ἐκ τοῦ φωτίζοντος σώματος γίνεσθαι πρῶτον ἐν τῶι μεταξὺ τόπωι τῆς τε γῆς καὶ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, εἶτα ἀφικνεῖσθαι πρὸς ἡμᾶς, λανθάνειν δὲ τὴν τοιαύτην αὐτοῦ κίνησιν διὰ τὴν ταχύτητα.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 133Light travels, and takes time to travel
Aristotle, On the Soul
Empedocles is not right, nor is anyone else who has spoken in this way — that light travels, and comes to be at some moment in the space between the earth and what surrounds us, while we fail to notice it … Over a short interval it might indeed escape notice; but that it should escape notice all the way from sunrise to sunset is far too much to ask.
Aristotle, On Sense and Sense-Objects
As Empedocles too says: the light from the sun arrives first at the space between, before it reaches the sight or the earth.
Philoponus, On Aristotle's On the Soul
Empedocles, who said that light, being a body, streams off from the illuminating body and comes to be first in the place between the earth and the heaven, and then arrives at us; and that a motion of this kind escapes our notice because of its speed.
Report, hostile in Aristotle, defended in Philoponus.
Aristotle reports the doctrine in order to reject it, and the ground of the rejection is worth marking: he does not say that light is not a body, but that no one has ever caught it in transit. The objection is empirical, and it is the objection that stood for two thousand years. Philoponus, defending Empedocles, supplies the answer Aristotle did not consider — that the interval is real but too brief to observe.
Bearing on Volume I. This is the earliest recorded statement that light has a finite speed.
418b20 γιγνομένου so also Themistius and Philoponus; τεινομένου in the manuscripts EV. — 446a26 τὸ μεταξύ] τὸν μεταξύ in EM, perhaps rightly, i.e. the visible sun.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 57
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.