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 plural Kēres denotes dooms or destructive death-bearing powers.
- In EmpedoclesB121 places Murder and Wrath beside the tribes of other Dooms in a joyless region.
- In this edition“Dooms” translates a plural noun.
- A place to readThe joyless region holds tribes of Dooms who roam through darkness.
Meaning
The plural Kēres denotes dooms or destructive death-bearing powers. The surviving form is genitive after “tribes.” The translation's capitalized “Dooms” gives them the status of personified presences within the scene rather than treating doom as an abstract prediction.
Use in the book
B121 places Murder and Wrath beside the tribes of other Dooms in a joyless region. The word “other” groups destructive presences together, but it need not determine a rigid mythological classification. They range through darkness across Ruin's meadow. Multiplicity is important: the place contains whole populations of affliction, not just one death figure.
Nothing in the quoted lines describes the Dooms' bodies, genealogy, individual names, or a distribution of particular punishments among them. Nor is the scene explicitly located in Hades. The fragment is most useful as evidence of the poet's vocabulary for a world experienced as sorrowful and dangerous. Its connection with the exile's story is a plausible reading of related fragments, not a preserved explanatory sentence.
Places to read
- B 121The joyless region holds tribes of Dooms who roam through darkness.
Translation in this edition
“Dooms” translates a plural noun. The excerpt is broken into two cited portions, so the printed layout must not be taken for a complete continuous description of an underworld court.