From the book
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordBradyporein means to travel slowly.
- In this workAëtius reports a world whose earliest human generation occurred under a day as long as ten current months, followed by a stage when a day matched seven months.
- In this editionThe closing sentence is probably damaged.
- A place to readExplains long early days by the sun's slow travel and associates two lengths with birth terms.
Meaning
Bradyporein means to travel slowly. The phrase assigns that slowness to the sun, and the duration of a day follows from it. “In one day” is the time within which the difficult concluding sentence situates an infant's growth.
Use in the book
Aëtius reports a world whose earliest human generation occurred under a day as long as ten current months, followed by a stage when a day matched seven months. The explanation makes cosmic movement historically variable and connects that change to reproductive timing. It should not be read as a measurement of ancient terrestrial rotation: the stated agent is the slowly travelling sun. Nor does it prove that the whole cosmos was steadily improving or that every biological time-scale changed in the same way. The earthborn setting ties the account to zoogony, but the report does not align the two long-day stages with each of A722's four generations. Its secure conceptual interest is a relation between changing cosmic motion and remembered or inherited bodily duration.
Places to read
- A 75 (testimony)Aëtius. Explains long early days by the sun's slow travel and associates two lengths with birth terms.
- A 70 (testimony)2Aëtius. Separately places the first trees before the distinction of day and night.
Translation in this edition
The closing sentence is probably damaged. The edition's attractive metaphor of viable terms as fossils of earlier days is interpretive; the printed report does not explain a mechanism of inherited temporal memory.