Iris

Use in the book

The line combines weather with a personal agent: Iris brings something. A reader can recognise the connection between a visible weather phenomenon and impending wind or rain, but the fragment does not explicitly state whether it is offering a prediction, a causal mechanism, or an extended divine image from a lost context. Its modest extent should govern the interpretation.

The sea is the point from which the wind or rain comes. This makes the fragment a useful companion to air as cloud-gatherer in B 149 and to the rain vocabulary used among the roots. It does not turn Iris into a fifth root or prove that rain has one exclusive cosmological source. B 1112's promise of weather-control employs related winds and rains in a different rhetorical setting and provides no missing continuation of B 50.

Places to read

1. B 50Iris brings wind or great rain from the sea.
2. B 149Air as cloud-gatherer supplies a related but separately transmitted weather image.
3. B 111.3–82The weather-control promise uses wind and rain in an independent context.

Translation in this edition

“Iris” preserves the Greek name; translating it only “rainbow” would emphasise the phenomenon while muting the personal action. The citing source is Tzetzes' Homeric Allegories, whose title alone cannot establish how Empedocles framed the line.