From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordLimenes and limenessin are forms of the word for harbours.
- In EmpedoclesIn B 112 the friends of Acragas are praised as reverend havens for strangers.
- In this editionBoth uses retain a nautical figure in the translation.
- A place to readThe meeting of constituents is anchored in Cypris’ perfect harbours.
Meaning
Limenes and limenessin are forms of the word for harbours. Hormistheisa describes being brought to anchorage. The image is used once of civic hosts and once within an account of bodily mixture.
Use in the book
In B 112 the friends of Acragas are praised as reverend havens for strangers. A harbour receives travellers and offers a place of refuge; the comparison turns civic hospitality into a spatial relation of welcome. It prepares the friendly relation between the speaking poet and the community he greets.
B 98 gives the image a cosmological and physiological setting. Earth meets the other constituents in approximately equal proportion, anchored in the perfect harbours of Cypris, and blood and flesh result. The harbour is no longer a literal civic institution but a figure for the secure coming-together achieved within the domain of the joining power. It makes mixture intelligible as arrival and accommodation.
The recurrence is a useful reminder that technical explanation and social address draw on a shared poetic world. The same image can describe welcoming persons and receiving constituents without asserting that those operations are identical. It would go too far to identify the harbours with anatomical vessels, pores, or an otherwise unnamed physical structure: the fragment does not make that equation. Likewise, “perfect” need not establish a geometrically specified basin.
The imagery carries a constructive aspect of Love's work that the abstract English “attraction” would obscure. Things arrive, find a place, and are held in a fitting relation. At the civic opening, comparable welcome is attributed to the listeners before they in turn receive the poet.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
Both uses retain a nautical figure in the translation. B 98 gives no explicit anatomical referent for the harbours, and the hospitable epithet in B 112 should not be turned into a literal claim about a seaport on the city's heights.