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 feminine names Physō and Phthimenē are translated “Growth” and “Decay.”
- In EmpedoclesIn B122/123 the pair opens the fifth line, immediately before She-of-the-Bed and Waking.
- In this edition“Decay” interprets the name Phthimenē.
- A place to readGrowth and Decay are named as adjacent figures.
Meaning
The feminine names Physō and Phthimenē are translated “Growth” and “Decay.” They invoke growing or emerging and fading or perishing. Their grammatical presentation as names is different from a general statement that something comes into being or passes away.
Use in the book
In B122/123 the pair opens the fifth line, immediately before She-of-the-Bed and Waking. The names place processes familiar from living things among the catalogue's opposed conditions. They do not independently assert that anything can arise from nothing or cease into nothing. Empedocles elsewhere denies those absolute processes and explains mortal birth and death through mixture and separation.
That physical doctrine can help prevent misreading, but it does not authorize us to say exactly which mixtures Physō or Phthimenē controls. The catalogue contains no verbs of action for the figures beyond their being “there.” The pair therefore exemplifies how conventional words for life-processes can remain available in a poetic language whose explanatory account is more qualified. It is not a miniature second cosmogony.
Places to read
- B 122/123.5Growth and Decay are named as adjacent figures.
- B 8.1–4The physical account qualifies the language of birth and death through mixture and interchange.
Translation in this edition
“Decay” interprets the name Phthimenē. It should not make the personification evidence for ultimate annihilation, nor should Physō be conflated with every occurrence of physis.