Diotimos Library · Greek Antiquity Collection · Bilingual Edition
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II
The Greek and Latin of Hermann Diels · New English translation and notes.
Explore the LexiconSwipe or use the arrow keys.
Facing Pages · Branch 75 of 126
Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 63
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 140Aristotle, Meteorology
τινὲς λέγουσιν ὡς ἐν τοῖς νέφεσιν ἐγγίνεται πῦρ. τοῦτο δ' Ἐ. μέν φησιν εἶναι τὸ ἐμπεριλαμβανόμενον τῶν τοῦ ἡλίου ἀκτίνων.
Aëtius
Ἐ. ἔμπτωσιν φωτὸς εἰς νέφος ἐξείργοντος τὸν ἀνθεστῶτα ἀέρα, οὗ τὴν μὲν σβέσιν καὶ τὴν θραῦσιν κτύπον ἀπεργάζεσθαι, τὴν δὲ λάμψιν ἀστραπήν, κεραυνὸν δὲ τὸν τῆς ἀστραπῆς τόνον.
Olympiodorus, On Aristotle's Meteorology
τί τὸ κινοῦν αὐτοὺς λοξὴν κίνησιν; ὅτι οὐ τὸ γεῶδες καὶ τὸ πυρῶδες τὴν ἐναντίαν κινούμενα κίνησιν, ὡς Ἐ. ὤιετο, ἀλλ' ὁ κύκλωι κινούμενος ἀήρ.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 141Lightning and thunder
Aristotle, Meteorology
Some say that fire comes to be within the clouds. Empedocles says that this fire is what gets caught and held from the sun's rays.
Aëtius
Empedocles: a falling of light into a cloud, which drives out the air standing against it; the quenching of that air and the shattering of it produce the crash, its flashing produces the lightning, and the thunderbolt is the lightning's force.
Report, Aristotle summarising, Aëtius expanding.
Both witnesses agree on the mechanism, which is that the fire in the cloud is solar fire that was trapped there — not fire generated on the spot. Thunder and lightning are then one event described from two sides, sound and light, differing only in what the air does.
σβέσιν is obscure; Diels conjectures σχίσιν, "splitting."
Why the winds blow slantwise
Olympiodorus, On Aristotle's Meteorology
What makes them [the winds] move slantwise? Not the earthy and the fiery moving with contrary motions, as Empedocles supposed, but the air that moves in a circle.
Late scholastic report, reliable only for the attribution.
A late scholastic notice, and reliable only for the bare attribution: Empedocles explained oblique motion by the crossing of two opposite tendencies. The principle is the one that governs his cosmos generally — a resultant produced by two forces pulling different ways.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 63
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.