Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

Nicolaus of Damascus, On Plants

Anaxagoras and Abrucalis say that plants are moved by desire, and assert that they also have sensation and feel pain and pleasure … Abrucalis moreover held that sex is mingled in them. — Anaxagoras and Democritus and Abrucalis used to say that they possess intellect and understanding. — What Abrucalis said, namely, whether there is found in plants a female sex and a male sex, or a kind mingled out of these two sexes. — And Abrucalis said that plants have generation while the world was still diminished and not complete in its fulness; and when it had been completed, the animal was generated.

Report from five witnesses, the last at four removes through Arabic.

This is the longest testimony in the volume, and it travels furthest. The last witness is a treatise that passed from Greek into Syriac, from Syriac into Arabic, from Arabic into Latin, and it calls Empedocles by a name no Greek would recognise. Yet its content is not fanciful: that plants desire, feel, and possess a sex is exactly what the Aëtius notice says in Greek, and B 79 gives it in verse. The two ends of the transmission agree, and it is only the middle that is illegible. The Theophrastus and Aristotle notices are objections, and both object to the same thing — that Empedocles explained a plant's shape by the downward tendency of earth and the upward tendency of fire, so that a tree is not a single organism growing but two opposed motions held in one body.

Bearing on Volume I. Empedocles' plants are alive in the full sense: they desire, they perceive, and they have sex. They are also older than the sun.

Aët. 2 περιαπλωθῆναι] an unclear expression, "spread itself round the celestial sphere"; Reiske conjectures περικυκλωθῆναι. — 4 διαιρόμενα Diels: διαιρούμενα G: διαιρουμένου AC: ἀραιουμένου B. — 9 ⟨παρὰ⟩ and ⟨γῆς⟩ supplied by Diels. — 11 χρηστὸν τὸν Diels: χρηστικὸν ABC. — "Abrucalis" is the Arabic rendering of Empedocles' name; elsewhere in the Arabic tradition the same form stands for Protagoras or Herophilus.