From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordThe two forms are genitives of the name Hades.
- In EmpedoclesThe climactic promise of B1112 is to lead out of Hades the strength of a dead man.
- In this editionThe version “strength,” for menos in B1112, matters: the translated promise is not the recovery of an explicitly named disembodied soul.
- A place to readThe speaker promises the addressee that he will lead a dead man’s strength out of Hades.
Meaning
The two forms are genitives of the name Hades. In B1112 “out of Hades” can designate the abode or sphere of the dead, while B142 imagines a roof associated with Hades. The name is related to the divine name Aidoneus in the root catalogue, but these passages do not automatically inherit any disputed elemental identification of that catalogue.
Use in the book
The climactic promise of B1112 is to lead out of Hades the strength of a dead man. It comes after remedies, mastery of winds, and changes between drought and rain. The line presents extraordinary command over the boundary of death as part of the teacher's promise. It does not specify a medical technique or establish that an actual resuscitation occurred. The introduction explicitly warns that later miracle biographies may derive from this poetry.
B142 preserves a damaged contrast: neither Zeus's roofed halls nor Hades's roof receives an unnamed person. The subject's exclusion is intelligible, but his identity and the completed syntax are not. B121's joyless place and meadow of Ruin may sound underworld-like; nevertheless, that fragment never calls the place Hades. Combining these items into a detailed geography of the afterlife would exceed the surviving words.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
The version “strength,” for menos in B1112, matters: the translated promise is not the recovery of an explicitly named disembodied soul. B142's brackets mark substantial textual loss.