From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordPhilophrosynē is friendly feeling or kindliness.
- In EmpedoclesThe couplet says that all were tame and gentle toward people, specifying beasts and birds, and that kindliness blazed.
- In this editionThe verb translated “blazed up” is a metaphor in this ethical setting.
- A place to readBeasts and birds are tame toward humans, while kindliness is imagined as blazing.
Meaning
Philophrosynē is friendly feeling or kindliness. Prosēnē characterizes creatures as gentle or approachable toward humans. In B130 these words describe relations across species, not merely courtesy within a human community.
Use in the book
The couplet says that all were tame and gentle toward people, specifying beasts and birds, and that kindliness blazed. The fire-image gives peaceful attachment vigour: friendliness is not a passive absence of motion. It is portrayed as an active condition spreading through relations among living things.
Read beside Cypris' bloodless reign in B1282, the line supports the picture of a community in which humans and animals do not stand in the usual relations of fear and slaughter. Nevertheless, the surviving couplet neither names Cypris nor explains the physiological cause of tameness. Its connection with the preceding scene in this edition is interpretively fruitful, but not a preserved statement that every word belongs to one continuous speech. The fragment also supplies no modern zoological claim that all animals can become safely tame.
Places to read
- B 130Beasts and birds are tame toward humans, while kindliness is imagined as blazing.
Translation in this edition
The verb translated “blazed up” is a metaphor in this ethical setting. It should not be converted into an assertion that kindliness is literally the root fire.