Friendship and cosmic attraction

Use in the book

The quoted verses describe things coming together into one through Love and being borne apart through Strife. Their commentator connects this with friendship and quarrels among the parts of the universe, using Homer’s divine reconciliation as an image. Another report explains the world’s generation and destruction by the alternating ascendancy of the two powers. The same vocabulary can thus describe social concord and a cosmic process.

Places to read

1. I.10.11b.2Empedoclean union is connected with Homeric reconciliation.
2. I.20.1f.3Love and Strife alternately dominate cosmic change.
3. Arith.2aFriendship is interpreted as harmony.
4. I.1.12bFriendly and hostile relations are brought into the hymn’s divine order.

Translation in this edition

“Love” names the cosmic power where the context requires it; it should not be confused with every occurrence of erōs.

Friendly and dear

Philos can mean friendly, dear, or a friend according to its construction. In I.1.12b, what is not friendly is friendly to Zeus within the hymn’s account of cosmic order. This is distinct from treating “Friendship” as a separately named physical power in Empedocles, even though both uses help describe reconciliation and union.

Use in the book

B 172 gives Love a cosmic reach: she is among the roots and equal in length and breadth, while Strife is apart. The passage then connects this presence with familiar embodied affection. Mortals regard her as inborn in their limbs; through her they think friendly thoughts and accomplish works of joining, calling her Gladness and Aphrodite. The poet asks the listener to discern her with the mind. This is not simply an appeal to abandon perception, since visible mixtures and living bodies become evidence in the following fragments. Rather, the power's full operation cannot be reduced to an immediately visible object.

B 20 makes bodily coherence an instance of the same principle. At flourishing life's height, the limbs allotted to a body come together through Love; their dispersal is attributed to evil Quarrels. B 22 adds a more complicated account of affinity: parts of the same kind are friendly, and things fitted for mixture are made alike by Aphrodite. Love's joining therefore operates across distinctions, not by erasing all characteristics before any compound can exist.

B 352 narrates an uneven advance. Love comes to the middle of the eddy; things join gradually rather than all at once; Strife still holds some apart. As Strife departs, Love's immortal onrush advances, and many forms of mortal life emerge. This mixed scene is essential. Living compounds require a structured plurality; their production occurs while the opposed powers have different but concurrent local effects. Total union in the Sphairos is a limit of the account, not simply the fullest version of an ordinary living organism.

The positive epithets are conspicuous: Love is kindly-hearted and blameless. Yet the statement in B 172 that coming-together both produces and destroys mortal things prevents a crude moral story in which every act of union preserves every creature. If all constituents unite into one, differentiated compounds cannot continue just as they were. The poem can value concord while acknowledging consequences at different scales.

The surviving cosmic account should also be distinguished from later classifications. Plutarch calls Love the benefactive principle in his framing of B 18, and his framing of B 19 associates it with the moist element. Those are valuable reception contexts, but neither author gives permission to replace Love by water throughout the corpus. B 172 separately names water and Love. “Attraction” may suggest one aspect of her effect, but loses the divine, social, and bodily language the poem deliberately retains.

Places to read

1. B 17.7–8, 18–2623Love is located among the roots, linked with embodied friendship, and named Gladness and Aphrodite by mortals.
2. B 20.1–7The joining of limbs at life's height gives a visible bodily instance of her work.
3. B 35.3–172Love advances through an incompletely mixed world while Strife withdraws.
4. B 18 (report)The isolated name Friendship is transmitted inside Plutarch's classification of opposed principles.
5. B 19The surviving phrase means clinging Love; the water identification is supplied by Plutarch's framing.
6. B 109.3Storgē appears in the formula of recognising like by like.

Translation in this edition

The edition capitalises Love and keeps the changes to Aphrodite, Cypris, and other names rather than translating all of them uniformly. Its introduction expressly rejects “Attraction” as a replacement. B 18 is a transmitted name in a report, not a recovered hexameter or a new continuous passage of the poem.

Use in the book

Simplicius’ Theophrastean report at A28 assigns Love the combining function and Strife the separating function. Aëtius calls the former unifying, and Diogenes repeats the same pairing. That elementary opposition is indispensable, but it is not the whole evidence. Aristotle’s A37 argues that Love also separates: as heterogeneous roots come together into one mixture, portions have to leave the homogeneous masses of their own kind. His objection turns on the scale at which joining and separation are described. The reader need not assume either that this refutes Empedocles or that Aristotle’s difficulty has no force.

Love’s relation to world-formation is equally disputed. Aristotle says in one passage of A42 that Empedocles passes over generation under Love, but in the other reports a cosmos formerly under Love comparable to the present one under Strife. Simplicius in A52 describes Love destroying the cosmos of Strife and producing the Sphairos. The modern note calls this an explicit symmetrical two-cosmos account, but the printed passage does not actually name a “cosmos of Love.” A responsible entry keeps the difference between the text and the reconstruction.

Nor should Love be equated without qualification with moral goodness. Aristotle at A39 proposes such a reading as the intelligible intention behind Empedocles’ supposed “stammering.” This is an interpretation offered with conditional qualifications. Love’s unifying action can also destroy a world of articulated individuals, as A52 states directly. That does not make Love evil; it shows that physical function, moral evaluation and the interests of particular compounds are different questions.

Finally, A28 itself records the difficulty of calling Love both an active principle and something ranked alongside the four. The six-principle classification is useful to the reporter, yet it should not erase the issue of what kind of being this power is. The dossier gives no single, unproblematic equivalent in the vocabulary of modern forces.

Aristotle at A782 asks whether Love causes any mixture or specifically one that accords with a ratio, and whether Love is the ratio or something distinct. These are questions, not answers that identify Love with proportion. They make the relation between the moving power and the determinate structure of a compound another unresolved part of the account.

Places to read

1. A 28 (testimony)Simplicius, Physics 25,21, from Theophrastus. Presents Love as a moving and combining principle, then reports the problem of its standing alongside the four.
2. A 37 (polemical)Aristotle, Metaphysics A 4, 985a21. Argues that Love separates homogeneous portions while joining unlike constituents.
3. A 39 (polemical)Aristotle, Metaphysics A 4, 984b32. Constructs Love as the cause of goods through an explicitly interpretative argument.
4. A 42 (polemical)Aristotle, De caelo Γ 2; De gen. et corr. B 7. Preserves both the alleged omission of a Love-cosmogony and a report about a former world under Love.
5. A 52 (testimony)Simplicius, De caelo 293,18. Describes Love gathering all into one, destroying the cosmos of Strife and making the Sphairos.
6. A 86 §§ 20–21 (polemical)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 20. Infers that Love’s combination should diminish or eliminate effluence and therefore perception.
7. A 78 (polemical)2Aristotle, On the Soul. Asks whether Love causes any mixture or proportionate mixture, and whether Love is itself the ratio or something different.

Translation in this edition

Do not normalize all occurrences to an invented Greek citation Φιλότης when the source prints Φιλία or an inflected form. The symmetry of the full cycle remains an interpretative question, not a consequence of translating Love consistently.