Acragas and the civic audience

Use in the book

The opening of B 112 locates a public voice in the heights of a city beside yellow Acragas. The speaker first praises the audience's good works and hospitality, then announces his own honoured, garlanded passage among them as an immortal god. The compliment to the hearers forms part of the relationship that makes the extraordinary self-presentation possible. The geographical name is therefore not merely a biographical label; it belongs to the poem's staging of reception.

The audience broadens within the same passage. Men and women in flourishing cities follow the speaker, some asking for oracles and others seeking a healing utterance. Their question concerns a path to benefit, profit, or advantage. The language need not reduce their needs to money: the following requests make bodily suffering and divination central. At the same time, a claim made in the poem about crowds and divine status cannot automatically become a verified account of the historical Empedocles' public career.

B 114 again addresses friends, this time warning how difficult truth will be to accept. Civic acclaim and resistance to conviction thus coexist in the surviving addresses. The difference from the intimate teaching of Pausanias is real at the level of rhetorical form, but it cannot alone decide whether there were separate poems. The introduction identifies Acragas with later Agrigentum and modern Agrigento; those geographical explanations belong to the editor's account.

The fillets and flourishing garlands worn by the speaker make his claimed honour visible. They belong to his presentation as a revered divine figure among people; the verse does not specify a separate coronation ceremony or make the adornments proof of a civic office.

Places to read

1. B 112.1–12Greeting, civic praise, divine self-presentation, and requests for help form one audience scene.
2. B 114.1–3Friends are warned that conviction is difficult to receive.
3. Introduction I (editorial discussion)The modern introduction identifies the ancient city and summarizes contested biographical material.

Translation in this edition

The phrase “by the yellow Acragas” should not be flattened into an unqualified statement that the city itself is yellow. The Greek address and local setting are preserved; the site's later names are supplied only by the introduction.

Use in the book

Acragas supplies the social setting of the Life: a distinguished horse-rearing family, magistrates and council, wealthy citizens, political opponents, and public ceremonies. Diogenes appeals to the opening of the Purifications as evidence that Empedocles himself claimed this civic identity. That appeal is stronger than treating every anecdote set in the city as autobiographical evidence. The attributed remark that its citizens enjoy luxury as though dying tomorrow but build as though immortal turns the city into an ethical example. Other reports make it the beneficiary of wind-control, dowries, and political intervention. The city is therefore both a location and the audience before whom the philosopher’s wealth, benevolence, authority, and alleged divinity are staged. Lucretius expands this civic label into a celebration of Sicily whose greatest marvel is the Acragantine thinker. Accounts of blocked return show, however, that civic celebrity need not mean permanent political security.

Places to read

1. A 1 §§ 53–55 (biography)2Diogenes Laertius VIII 54. Uses the opening of the Purifications to support Acragantine origin.
2. A 1 §§ 61–63 (biography)Diogenes Laertius VIII 63. Gives the luxury-and-building saying and a population figure.
3. A 21 (reception)Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Names the thinker Acragantinus before praising his island.

Translation in this edition

The Greek population expression printed at VIII 63, μυριάδες … ὀγδοήκοντα, means eighty myriads, or 800,000, whereas the translation gives “eighty thousand.” Neither is accepted here as a historical census. Nor does the civic setting verify an anecdote’s historical occurrence.