From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordAtrapos is a path; the source prints its inflected form atrapon.
- In EmpedoclesThe poet often imagines instruction as directed movement through a route.
- In this edition“Path of songs” translates a phrase with hymnoi, and should not be restricted to a surviving independent hymn.
- A place to readSummits and a path figure the arrangement of words.
Meaning
Atrapos is a path; the source prints its inflected form atrapon. Poron hymnōn is a passage or path of songs. Exocheteuōn describes channelling out. Hamaxitos is a broad roadway, translated a highway in the account of persuasion.
Use in the book
The poet often imagines instruction as directed movement through a route. B 24 fastens one summit to another while referring, negatively, to completing a single path of words. Because the fragment begins and ends within a larger utterance, the exact reason for the negative cannot be reconstructed. It preserves an image of arrangement, not a complete manifesto that the poem must be nonlinear.
B 352 is clearer. The speaker turns back to a previously recounted path of songs and channels one account from another. The same passage describes streams of mortal beings emerging from mixture. The resemblance of expository and physical movement is striking, but it need not mean that every feature of the discourse duplicates a cosmic event. It is enough that the poetry gives teaching a material direction, continuity, and controlled flow.
B 133 changes the scale to a highway of persuasion entering human thought through sight and touch. Access to the divine subject is blocked along that ordinary road. B 112 provides another path, the route to benefit sought by those following the speaker. The latter is the audience's practical question rather than the poet's map of his own exposition.
These different roads should be kept distinct. Some belong to the formation of a speech, some to the ways of knowing, and some to the desired outcome of consultation. Together they show why the rendering of poros as channel or passage matters: a way through can organize knowledge as well as bodily transport. The poem's routes remain relational and purposeful, rather than interchangeable ornaments.
Places to read
- B 24Summits and a path figure the arrangement of words.
- B 35.1–2Return and channelling describe the renewal of an argument.
- B 133.2–3A highway carries ordinary persuasion into the mind.
- B 112.8–11Followers ask for a path toward benefit.
- B 3.12–13A channel of understanding connects the road-image with faculties.
Translation in this edition
“Path of songs” translates a phrase with hymnoi, and should not be restricted to a surviving independent hymn. The fragmentary negative of B 24 requires special restraint: the edition does not restore a complete sentence explaining the abandoned or multiple path.