From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordB34 preserves a participial phrase about gluing barley-meal with water.
- In EmpedoclesThe example gives a familiar material basis for thinking about compounds.
- In this editionThe incomplete participial grammar should remain visible in paraphrase: someone or something has glued the meal, but the agent and larger proposition are absent.
- A place to readThe whole fragment describes gluing barley-meal with water.
Meaning
B34 preserves a participial phrase about gluing barley-meal with water. The substance being joined is granular meal, and the joining agent is water. The vocabulary emphasizes cohesion rather than simply wetness.
Use in the book
The example gives a familiar material basis for thinking about compounds. Water can help separate grains become a connected mass; the process is presented through a verb also appropriate to glue. It thereby makes visible how one material can alter the relations among portions of another.
The fragment is too short to identify its subject or the main argument to which the participle belonged. The source reference to the fourth book of the Meteorology transmitted under Aristotle’s name locates its preservation, but the book does not reproduce a complete discussion there. A particular Empedoclean recipe or cosmic application should not be invented from that citation.
Its strongest comparisons are internal to the surviving poem. Fig-juice binds milk; Harmonia’s gluings fit bone; Cypris moistens earth before fire hardens forms. In these examples moisture, fit, and hardening cooperate in different ways. B34 contributes the specific case in which water itself supplies a joining effect. It does not entail that all water always binds or that water is simply identical with Love in every context.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
The incomplete participial grammar should remain visible in paraphrase: someone or something has glued the meal, but the agent and larger proposition are absent. The word “glue” is an explanatory image, not a claim about a separate manufactured adhesive.