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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Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 82
Ancient Greek and Latin
p. 184Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals
τὸ δὲ τῶν ἡμιόνων γένος ὅλον ἄγονόν ἐστιν. περὶ δὲ τῆς αἰτίας, ὡς μὲν λέγουσιν Ἐ. καὶ Δημόκριτος, λέγων ὁ μὲν οὐ σαφῶς, Δημόκριτος δὲ γνωρίμως μᾶλλον, οὐ καλῶς εἰρήκασιν. λέγουσι γὰρ ἐπὶ πάντων ὁμοίως τὴν ἀπόδειξιν τῶν παρὰ τὴν συγγένειαν συνδυαζομένων … Ἐ. δ' αἰτιᾶται κτλ.
Aëtius
διὰ τί αἱ ἡμίονοι στεῖραι; Ἐ. διὰ τὴν σμικρότητα καὶ ταπεινότητα καὶ στενότητα τῆς μήτρας κατεστραμμένως προσπεφυκυίας τῆι γαστρὶ μήτε τοῦ σπέρματος εὐθυβολοῦντος εἰς αὐτὴν μήτε, εἰ καὶ φθάσειεν, αὐτῆς ἐκδεχομένης.
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II: Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies
p. 185Why mules are barren
Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals
The whole kind of mules is infertile. As to the cause: what Empedocles and Democritus say — the one speaking unclearly, Democritus rather more intelligibly — is not well said. For they offer one and the same demonstration for every case of animals that mate outside their own kind … Empedocles assigns as the cause, and so on.
Aëtius
Why are mules barren? Empedocles: because of the smallness and the lowness and the narrowness of the womb, which is attached to the belly the wrong way about, so that the seed neither strikes straight into it nor, even if it should get there, is received by it.
Report, with Aristotle’s objection attached.
Aristotle's complaint is worth more than the doctrine: Empedocles and Democritus, he says, give one explanation for every cross-kind mating, and he rejects it for that reason. Empedocles' own account, as fragment B 92 shows, was that two soft things can mix into something hard — bronze from tin and copper — and the mule's seed was hardened in the same way. The Aëtius entry has lost that and put a purely anatomical explanation in its place.
Compare fragment B 92, where Aristotle quotes Empedocles' own comparison of the mixture to tin and copper.
Socrates
Reading Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II · Light, Sea, Plants and Bodies · A 82
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.