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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English Introduction · Branch 9 of 126
Introduction · One Poem or Two
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Introduction
p. 8One poem or two
Whether the On Nature and the Purifications are two works or one has been argued for two centuries, and the testimonia bear on it more than is usually noticed.
Three notices in this volume show the physics and the religion joined at the seam. At A 62, Hippolytus reports that evils reach as far as the moon and no further, because the region above it is purer — which makes the moon the boundary of the world of exile described in the Purifications, and makes that world a piece of cosmology. At A 96, a doxographer records that Empedocles identified mind with soul, and draws the consequence that no animal is irrational in the strict sense: which is precisely what the transmigration of B 117 requires, and turns a religious doctrine into a physical one. And at A 98, the last of the testimonia, a Latin physician reports that the school distinguished two kinds of madness — one with a bodily cause, and one that is ex animi purgamento, from a purification of the soul. Purgamentum is the Latin for katharmos. Whatever divided the two poems, the men who read both did not think the division ran through the mind.
Against this stands A 85, where death is the separating out of the four roots, "so that in this respect death is common to body and soul alike." If the soul is a ratio and the ratio comes apart, nothing survives; and the wandering daimon of the Purifications has nowhere to go. That contradiction is the oldest unsettled question about Empedocles, and this volume does not settle it either. What it does is print both sides on facing pages and mark the join.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Introduction · One Poem or Two
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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.