Hair

Use in the book

The passage uses the accusative plural τρίχας of the boy’s fair hair. The changing stem explains why the form does not look exactly like the dictionary headword.

The plural controls feminine adjectives and pronouns throughout the analogy: the hairs appear white after coating and become white through old age. Tracking that agreement helps separate the hair itself from the whitening material applied to it.

Places to read

1. 217dτὰς τρίχας ψιμυθίῳ ἀλείψειεν — Might smear the hair with white lead.
2. 217d–e

Use in the book

The Timaeus describes birds as growing feathers in place of hair when certain human lives are refashioned. The contrast supplies a visible bodily sign of transformation. Hair’s role is therefore comparative: it marks the earlier human covering against the new avian one.

Places to read

1. I.47.1.6Feathers replace hair in the narrative of birds’ origin.

Translation in this edition

“Hair” translates the plural naturally in English; individual strands need not be emphasized.

Use in the book

B82 says that hair and the other listed coverings are “the same things.” Its boldness lies in finding continuity among forms normally classified by different organisms: a plant’s leaves, a bird’s feathers, and a hairy or scaled animal’s surface are brought under a common explanation. The verse does not offer the modern claim that these structures are anatomically identical in every respect. In the setting of a mixture theory, sameness concerns shared material or formative explanation while visible forms remain diverse.

B67 approaches hairiness through temperature. The warmer male-bearing region is followed by a description of men as darker and hairier. This ancient causal association belongs to the specific reproductive theory of that fragment. It should not be converted into a rule for modern individuals or used to validate bodily stereotypes.

The hedgehog’s bristles in B83 provide a vivid special case of surface growth. Their pointed, erect quality is explicitly described, but the poem as printed does not connect them by an argument to the particular temperature claim about men. Shared bodily vocabulary encourages comparison without making every explanation universal.

Places to read

1. B 82Hair is placed beside leaves, plumage, and scales.
2. B 67Greater hairiness appears in the warmth-based explanation of male characteristics.
3. B 83The pointed bristles of hedgehogs illustrate a distinctive surface covering.

Translation in this edition

The edition’s “the same things” should be retained as the strong comparative claim it is, while avoiding the modern technical vocabulary of evolutionary homology, which the fragment does not supply.

Use in the book

The critic says bone and hair would perceive because they too consist of all the elements. The point is not that they are blood, but that the general elemental condition invoked for cognition appears insufficiently specific. If possession of the constituents which recognize their counterparts is enough, an apparently nonperceiving bodily product meets that condition as well.

The example therefore complements rather than repeats the bloodless-animal objection. Bloodlessness challenges the privileged material medium; hair challenges the adequacy of elemental composition as such. It would be misleading to say Empedocles expressly taught that each hair thinks. The statement is Theophrastus's inferred consequence, used to demand a distinction among tissues, cognitive organs, and thinking animals. A broader account of the bodily parts may help contextualize it, but the printed paragraph supplies no response that resolves the difficulty.

Places to read

1. A 86 §§ 22–23 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 23. Pairs hair with bone in an inferred consequence of the elemental account of perception.

Translation in this edition

The edition's prose says there would be “nothing to stop a hair from thinking.” The ancient sentence specifically says bone and hair would perceive; the extension to thinking follows the surrounding argument rather than that clause's verb alone.