From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordThe phrase combines a landscape noun, meadows, with an adjective meaning split or cleft, and attaches it to Aphrodite.
- In EmpedoclesB66 is only a broken phrase with a supplied preposition, “into.”
- In this editionThe angle brackets around “into” mark a supplement.
- A place to readThe fragment names the cloven meadows of Aphrodite, with an editorially supplied “into.”
Meaning
The phrase combines a landscape noun, meadows, with an adjective meaning split or cleft, and attaches it to Aphrodite. The edition gives “cloven meadows.” The bodily or sexual interpretation draws on the goddess's name and the image's shape; the surviving phrase does not itself name a particular organ.
Use in the book
B66 is only a broken phrase with a supplied preposition, “into.” It invites the reader to hear a landscape as an image of bodily generation or sexual union. Such imagery is consistent with Aphrodite's broader association with attraction and the formation of living bodies, but the sentence around it is lost. We cannot confidently identify the speaker, the object entering the meadows, or the exact operation being described.
The metaphor should also be kept distinct from Ruin's meadow in B121. Both use a familiar landscape noun, but their modifiers and divine associations produce very different effects. A lexicon benefits from registering that range rather than assigning a single secret meaning to every meadow. Here the most secure reading is an evocative spatial figure with likely sexual force, whose precise anatomical explanation remains uncertain in the evidence supplied.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
The angle brackets around “into” mark a supplement. The phrase's placement among reproductive fragments assists a reading but does not independently establish its original context; that arrangement is editorial.