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.
Ancient Greek and Latin Page · Branch 86 of 126
Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 72 (continued)
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 162Varro, Eumenides
E. natos homines ex terra ait ut blitum.
Aristotle, On Respiration
Ἐ. δ' οὐ καλῶς τοῦτ' εἴρηκε φάσκων τὰ θερμότατα καὶ πῦρ ἔχοντα πλεῖστον τῶν ζώιων ἔνυδρα εἶναι φεύγοντα τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τῆς ἐν τῆι φύσει θερμότητος.
Theophrastus, On the Causes of Plants
ὥσπερ καὶ Ἐ. λέγει περὶ τῶν ζώιων· τὰ γὰρ ὑπέρπυρα τὴν φύσιν ἄγειν εἰς τὸ ὑγρόν.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 163Varro, Eumenides
Empedocles says that men grew out of the earth like a garden herb.
Report, confirmed independently by a reader of the poem.
The four stages are the most famous thing in Empedocles after the four roots, and the sequence is strictly evolutionary in form while being nothing like Darwin in content. Scattered limbs; then those limbs joined into shapes that are seemings rather than animals; then whole-natured creatures, undifferentiated and without sex; and only in the fourth stage generation of like from like, which is the world we live in. Sexual reproduction is thus the latest thing in nature, not the first. Censorinus, who read the poem, confirms the first stage independently, and Varro's one contemptuous line shows the doctrine had passed into the currency of educated Rome.
Bearing on Volume I. The scattered limbs of stage one are what B 57 and B 58 describe in verse.
4 ὁμοίων is probably corrupt; Reiske conjectures οἰκείων, Gomperz ὁμοστοίχων, Diels ὁμοιομερῶν. — 5 the words τοῖς δὲ καὶ τοῖς ζώιοις are deleted as a scholion. — 7 οἰκειοτέραν Dübner: οἰκειότερα in the manuscripts. — 8 ἀναπτῆναι ὅσ' ἄν Diels: ἀναπνεῖν ἕως ἄν in the manuscripts. — 9 the closing words are corrupt in all manuscripts; the rendering follows Diels's π. τοῖς χωρίοις σύμφωνα εἶναι.
Why the hottest animals live in water
Aristotle, On Respiration
Empedocles has not put this well, in asserting that the hottest of animals, those having most fire, are water-dwellers, fleeing the excess of the heat in their own nature.
Theophrastus, On the Causes of Plants
As Empedocles too says about animals: for what is over-fiery in nature is led toward the moist.
Report, in both witnesses given in order to be corrected.
The principle is compensation, not likeness: a creature seeks the element it lacks, or flees the one it has too much of. It is the same principle that makes the fourth root the corrective of the third throughout the physiology, and it is the reason the doctrine sounds backwards on first hearing — the hottest animals are in the coldest place because they are the hottest.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 72 (continued)
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.