From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordStegasai means to shelter or keep covered.
- In EmpedoclesB 5 is a small but concentrated image of inward safekeeping.
- In this editionAngle brackets around ‹τὰ δόγματα› are decisive.
- A place to readThe secure words concern sheltering within a speechless breast; the object is supplied.
Meaning
Stegasai means to shelter or keep covered. B 5 puts that shelter inside a speechless breast, phrenos ellopos. Ereisas in B 110 concerns fixing or securing the objects of instruction within the hearer's understanding.
Use in the book
B 5 is a small but concentrated image of inward safekeeping. What matters is not only hearing teaching in public but keeping it inside oneself. The breast is speechless: it can hold what the tongue does not immediately repeat. This gives an important counterpoint to the recurrent imperatives to speak and listen.
The surviving phrase does not, however, preserve its own object. The edition inserts “the doctrines” in angle brackets. The reader can reasonably interpret the line in relation to teaching, but must not quote that supplied noun as securely transmitted Empedoclean terminology. Nor does a command to keep something inward by itself establish a universal oath of secrecy.
B 110 offers a more developed picture of retention. Carefully attended things remain with the learner through life, grow according to their character, and give rise to further acquisitions; distraction makes them depart. Their persistence therefore demands more than storage. The learner must sustain a favourable and pure mode of attention. The two fragments illuminate each other as images of keeping, while leaving unresolved the original setting and exact referent of the shorter line.
This inward silence is distinct from the personified Silence named beside Utterance in B 122/123. The shared English lookup word should not make them one figure or one doctrine.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
Angle brackets around ‹τὰ δόγματα› are decisive. “Doctrines” supplies a modern editorial completion of the broken quotation and cannot support an independent claim about the poet's exact technical vocabulary.