DiotimosReading Desk

Divine names and personifications

Murder and bloodshed

Φόνος (Phonos); φόνωι (phonōi); φόνοιο (phonoio)

Phonos names killing or bloodshed and, by extension, the blood associated with slaughter.

From the book

Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordPhonos names killing or bloodshed and, by extension, the blood associated with slaughter.
  • In EmpedoclesIn B1152 the offender pollutes his own limbs through bloodshed.
  • In this editionB1282 translates the plural phonoi as “blood” in the phrase about bulls.
  • A place to readKilling defiles the offender’s own limbs.

Meaning

Phonos names killing or bloodshed and, by extension, the blood associated with slaughter. B121 capitalizes Murder as one of the inhabitants of the joyless place. The ethical contexts must nevertheless be distinguished from B1002, where a form of the same word occurs in the description of blood retained within bodily passages.

Use in the book

In B1152 the offender pollutes his own limbs through bloodshed. The damage therefore does not stop with the victim: it changes the killer's standing and brings exile. B136 turns the charge into an urgent appeal to the audience to stop slaughter. Its next line explains why the act is cognitively as well as ethically disordered: people devour one another without understanding what they do. B137 dramatizes this claim in the father who slaughters his transformed son.

Personified Murder in B121 gives the same violence a place in the landscape of suffering, alongside Wrath and the tribes of Dooms. Conversely, in B1282 the altar under Cypris is free of bulls' slaughter-blood, and the tearing out of life is called the greatest defilement. The contrast is between forms of action and worship, not between having physical blood and being morally impure. Blood is a normal constituent of living bodies elsewhere in the poem, and the vocabulary's range should prevent that confusion.

Places to read

  1. B 115.3Killing defiles the offender’s own limbs.
  2. B 121Murder appears as a named actor in the joyless region.
  3. B 136The audience is commanded to cease slaughter.
  4. B 128.8–10The undrenched altar contrasts with killing and devouring.
  5. B 100.4–5The same lexical family denotes blood contained in the body, without a moral accusation.

Translation in this edition

B1282 translates the plural phonoi as “blood” in the phrase about bulls. This does not erase the association with slaughter. It is distinct from haima, the more ordinary blood-word prominent in the physiological fragments.