Cycle and period

Use in the book

The astronomical report describes a year of Saturn as a circuit of thirty ordinary years and gives different periods for other bodies. The same word thus joins spatial return with elapsed time. The reference body matters: a planetary year is not automatically a terrestrial calendar year.

Places to read

1. I.8.42c.1The planets’ circuits are expressed as differing periods.

Translation in this edition

“Circuit” foregrounds the motion; “period” foregrounds its duration.

Use in the book

B 172 and B 26 supply the main surviving statements of alternation. At one time the constituents come together through Love; at another they are carried apart through Strife. Each prevails in turn. The constituents are said to be forever unmoved throughout the cycle, even while they continually interchange. “Unmoved” cannot be detached from this context and made a simple denial of the movements the same passage describes. The stable identity or enduring regularity is contrasted with the impermanent lives of particular compounds.

The Sphere, the growth of Strife, and Love's advance through an incompletely mixed world supply important phases or scenes. Their exact relations are partly reconstructed because they survive as quotations in different sources. The editorial sequence does not itself establish a complete timeline. The double birth and failing of mortals in B 172 is especially important evidence, but does not, without argument, settle every proposed double or single world-formation scheme.

The introduction describes the long-running dispute between accounts with two cosmogonies and accounts with one. It also reports a later timetable from Byzantine scholia and an interpretation of its numbers. Those matters are modern apparatus discussing evidence not printed as Empedoclean verses here. They should not be converted into exact durations for the cycle in this lexicon.

What remains firm is the combination of permanence and recurrent transformation: the sources persist, their dominance changes, and mortal compounds arise and fail through the processes. That is a substantial doctrine even where the chronology of every cosmic scene remains open.

Places to read

1. B 17.1–13, 27–352Alternation of Love and Strife and the qualified claim of cyclic permanence.
2. B 26.1–12The cycle comes round and the sources grow and wane by appointed turns.
3. B 30The rise of Strife is timed and oath-bound.
4. B 352Love advances while Strife's retreat remains incomplete.
5. Introduction V (editorial discussion)The one/two-cosmogony debate and later timetable are discussed rather than settled.

Translation in this edition

The translation's “unmoved throughout the cycle” preserves a difficult expression; explaining it should not mean silently replacing it with a smoother invented line. The numbered fragments are units of collection, not chapters of the original cosmic history.

Use in the book

Aristotle at A46 provides a particularly clear contrast: Empedocles makes the separations recur periodically, while Anaxagoras has a once-only process. Plato’s earlier-style characterization at A29 emphasizes being one and many by turns, although it names neither thinker. Simplicius at A52 describes the same world coming to be and perishing repeatedly, and calls the succession everlasting. Together the notices strongly support recurrent change as a central reading of the system.

The architecture of that recurrence is less settled. A38’s intervening rest is cautiously attributed by Aristotle as what Empedocles would seem to say. A42 contains both Aristotle’s statement that a cosmogony under Love was omitted and his report that the world was formerly under Love as it now is under Strife. Simplicius in A52 names a cosmos of Strife, its dissolution into the Sphairos under Love, and a present-kind cosmos produced when Strife separates the elements. The modern editor calls this an explicit account of two cosmoi, one of Love and one of Strife, but the printed excerpt does not expressly name the former.

Nor does chronological order pass without challenge. Simplicius’ later passage in the same A-number suggests that philosophers may narrate generation from simple constituents for teaching, as though those constituents had existed earlier in time. That is an interpretative proposal, distinct from the straightforward recurrent narrative.

The lexicon therefore uses “cycle” for the well-attested recurrence without deciding every contested transition. A complete reconstruction must distinguish the persistence of roots, destruction of arrangements, dominance of powers, presence or absence of rest, and possibility of comparable worlds on both directions of change. Calling the cycle symmetrical cannot substitute for those arguments.

Places to read

1. A 46 (testimony)Aristotle, Physics A 4, 187a20. Explicitly contrasts Empedocles’ periodic separation with Anaxagoras’ once-only event.
2. A 38 (polemical)Aristotle, Physics Θ 1, 252a7. Hypothetically attributes necessary alternation and intervening rest.
3. A 42 (polemical)Aristotle, De caelo Γ 2; De gen. et corr. B 7. Preserves the tension between omitted generation under Love and a former world under Love.
4. A 52 (testimony)Simplicius, De caelo 293,18 and 305,21. First reports recurring world-formation, then offers a separate expository reading of temporal language.

Translation in this edition

A52’s editorial claim that the excerpt explicitly names two cosmoi overstates what is printed. Its reference to the B17 quotation concerns the surrounding transmission; the quoted verses themselves are not reproduced in the excerpt.