From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordAsapheia is lack of clarity or obscurity.
- In EmpedoclesB122/123 pairs dark-haired Obscurity with lovely Truth-Unerring.
- In this editionThe translation “Obscurity” preserves the privative sense of the name.
- A place to readDark-haired Obscurity stands beside lovely Truth-Unerring.
Meaning
Asapheia is lack of clarity or obscurity. Its personification is described as dark-haired. The word concerns what is unclear; it does not necessarily mean deliberate deception, error, or an absolute absence of knowledge.
Use in the book
B122/123 pairs dark-haired Obscurity with lovely Truth-Unerring. Her epithet turns an abstract quality into a visible figure and may reinforce the sense of darkness, but the line does not spell out an allegorical decoding of hair colour. It is safer to preserve the striking description than to make it a physiological claim about dark bodies or their mental powers.
The opposition belongs to a catalogue containing bodily, temporal, affective, and verbal contrasts. That setting makes the contrast broadly intelligible without proving a single underlying scheme for all the pairs. Obscurity should therefore not be assigned an independent causal office beside Love and Strife. Nor does this isolated name establish that Empedocles rejected sensory observation: other fragments explicitly urge the careful use of multiple faculties. Here the poet supplies a personified condition of unclear disclosure.
Places to read
- B 122/123.4Dark-haired Obscurity stands beside lovely Truth-Unerring.
Translation in this edition
The translation “Obscurity” preserves the privative sense of the name. It should not be replaced with “Falsehood,” since that would collapse lack of clarity into a more specific ethical and epistemic fault.