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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Ancient Greek and Latin Page · Branch 73 of 126
Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 60
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 136Aëtius
Ἐ. ἀέρα συνεστραμμένον, νεφοειδῆ, πεπηγότα ὑπὸ πυρός, ὥστε σύμμικτον.
Plutarch, On the Face in the Moon
καὶ γὰρ Ἐμπεδοκλεῖ δυσκολαίνουσι πάγον ἀέρος χαλαζώδη ποιοῦντι τὴν σελήνην ὑπὸ τῆς τοῦ πυρὸς σφαίρας περιεχόμενον.
Aëtius
δισκοειδῆ.
Plutarch, Roman Questions
τὸ γὰρ φαινόμενον σχῆμα τῆς σελήνης, ὅταν ἦι διχόμηνος, οὐ σφαιροειδὲς ἀλλὰ φακοειδές ἐστι καὶ δισκοειδές, ὡς δ' Ἐ. οἴεται, καὶ τὸ ὑποκείμενον.
Aëtius
Θαλῆς πρῶτος ἔφη ὑπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου φωτίζεσθαι. Πυθαγόρας, Παρμενίδης, Ἐ. … ὁμοίως.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 137The moon — its matter, its shape, its borrowed light
Aëtius
Empedocles: [the moon is] air compacted, cloud-like, congealed by fire, so that it is a mixture.
Plutarch, On the Face in the Moon
For they take issue with Empedocles as well, for making the moon a hail-like freezing of air, enclosed by the sphere of fire.
Aëtius
[The moon is] disc-shaped.
Plutarch, Roman Questions
For the apparent shape of the moon, when it is at the half, is not spherical but lentil-shaped and disc-like; and so too, as Empedocles thinks, is the body underlying the appearance.
Aëtius
Thales was the first to say that it is lit by the sun. Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles … likewise.
Doxographic report, with two arguing witnesses from Plutarch.
Plutarch is the valuable witness here, because he is arguing rather than cataloguing, and he tells us what the disc-claim meant. Empedocles is not reporting how the moon looks; he holds that the moon is the shape it looks. That is a stronger and stranger position than the doxography's single word conveys, and Plutarch cites it precisely because he finds it hard to defend.
Bearing on Volume I. A case where a later author's argument preserves the sense a handbook entry had lost.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 60
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.