From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordKatharmoi means purifications and appears as a work-title in the editorial headings and in Theon's report at B153a.
- In EmpedoclesThe command at B144 is brief enough to resist a detailed reconstruction of ritual practice.
- In this editionKatharmoi is an attested reported title, not proof that the printed section reproduces an original continuous work.
- A place to readThe surviving phrase enjoins fasting from wickedness.
Meaning
Katharmoi means purifications and appears as a work-title in the editorial headings and in Theon's report at B153a. It is not a word spoken in a surviving verse under that heading. B144's more concrete phrase is “to fast from wickedness”: an abstention word transfers the language of food-discipline into ethical conduct.
Use in the book
The command at B144 is brief enough to resist a detailed reconstruction of ritual practice. It tells the reader what to refrain from, wickedness, rather than naming a duration without food, a washing, or a sacrificial ceremony. Its figurative force is especially pointed in a corpus that also prohibits slaughter, meat-eating, laurel leaves, and beans. Restraint can concern both particular substances and destructive behaviour more broadly.
B145 adds that those distracted by grievous wickedness will not ease their hearts of sorrow. It makes ethical disorder and suffering mutually relevant, but supplies no procedural promise that a particular rite will immediately remove pain. B32's pure spring of holy speech and B110's pure studies show that purity-language also belongs to speaking and learning. A regimen of purification in this corpus is therefore wider than diet, even though no complete manual survives.
The title cannot be used to quarantine all these themes in one original religious poem. This edition explicitly treats the allocation of fragments as editorial and discusses the uncertainty of the one-poem/two-poem question. B153a is especially instructive: a later author associates embryological material with the Purifications. The work-title does not guarantee a modern division between bodily explanation and ritual teaching.
Places to read
- B 144The surviving phrase enjoins fasting from wickedness.
- B 145Wickedness is connected with continuing sorrow.
- B 3.1–8Purity and holiness characterize proper speech.
- B 110.1–5The student is to contemplate with pure studies.
- B 153a (report)Theon attributes an embryological hint to the work called Purifications.
Translation in this edition
Katharmoi is an attested reported title, not proof that the printed section reproduces an original continuous work. B144 is a fragmentary phrase; it does not establish a prescribed fast of any specified length.