From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordThe verb ὠιοτοκεῖ describes egg-bearing or egg-laying, here assigned to tall trees.
- In EmpedoclesThis transfer of animal language into botany is one of the clearest expressions of continuity across living kinds.
- In this editionThe English dash makes the appositional relation between eggs and olives easy to grasp.
- A place to readThe single verse assigns egg-bearing to tall trees and names olives.
Meaning
The verb ὠιοτοκεῖ describes egg-bearing or egg-laying, here assigned to tall trees. The named products are olives. The line does not merely compare an olive’s appearance to an egg; it applies the reproductive verb directly to the tree.
Use in the book
This transfer of animal language into botany is one of the clearest expressions of continuity across living kinds. The tree produces a distinct, bounded generative object, and the egg-image makes that object intelligible as part of reproduction. It fits the poem’s movement in the other direction, where heads and human forms sprout like plants.
The precise object of “first” is less fully secured by the isolated line. The edition gives “first bear eggs — the olives,” but the missing context prevents reconstruction of a complete chronology: the word could have had a role within an argument no longer present. The verse should not be made to assert a documented historical priority of olive trees over every other plant.
Aristotle’s Generation of Animals preserves the fragment. That witness makes the reproductive comparison especially apt, but the book does not reproduce an extended Aristotelian explanation here. What is directly available is the Empedoclean formulation of olives as the egg-like products of trees, not a complete theory of plant fertilization or seed structure.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
The English dash makes the appositional relation between eggs and olives easy to grasp. A paraphrase that merely says trees bear fruit loses the most distinctive lexical claim of the line.