Reflected light

Use in the book

The report about Empedocles distinguishes an original fiery sun from the visible sun as its reflection. The account connects earth, a crystal-like sun, and a moving fiery hemisphere in a compressed explanation. The distinction between original light and visible reflection is clearer than the exact arrangement of all the reflecting surfaces.

Places to read

1. I.25.3e.1The visible sun is explained as a reflection of an original fire.

Translation in this edition

“Reflection” or “reflected light” suits the context; preserve the distinction from the original source.

Use in the book

The clearest astronomical linkage is lunar. A ray strikes the moon's broad circle in B 43, and B 45 makes the borrowed light circle around earth. B 42 shows light being blocked in an eclipse. Together, they distinguish a luminous source, a receiving body, and an interruption of rays without requiring a later optical vocabulary.

B 44 says something flashes back towards Olympus with an undaunted face. The printed line leaves its subject unnamed. It supplies a reflection-like action and direction, but cannot by itself settle which celestial body is intended or establish all details of an ancient solar-reflection theory. That would require the surrounding source or further testimony not printed here.

At the bodily scale, B 842 compares the finer light escaping a lamp's screens with fire passing outward through the eye's tissues. This is a distinct use of rays in an account of vision. It should be compared with the celestial lines without reducing the whole perceptual explanation to ordinary reflected sunlight. B 135's boundless light, finally, helps express the universal reach of law, showing how physical radiance can also mark comprehensive scope.

Places to read

1. B 43A ray strikes the lunar circle.
2. B 45The light circling earth is described as belonging to another.
3. B 44An unnamed subject flashes back towards Olympus.
4. B 84.1–112Light escapes lamp screens in rays, providing the comparison for fire in the eye.
5. B 135Boundless light marks the extent of what is lawful for all.

Translation in this edition

The translation's “not her own” supplies a natural lunar reading, but B 44's “it” preserves an unresolved subject. The lexicon should not silently merge the two fragments into a single unbroken statement about one reflector.

Use in the book

Aëtius credits Thales with first saying that the moon is illuminated by the sun, then groups Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles as holding the same. The report provides a clear attribution but almost no mechanism. It does not specify reflection from a smooth surface, diffuse scattering, transmission, or a theory of lunar phases. Those details must not be inferred simply because a modern account of moonlight would include them. The grouping also has a historiographical purpose: it constructs a line of predecessors and followers around a proposition. It is therefore evidence for how the doxographic tradition classified Empedocles as well as for the proposition itself. The adjacent physical reports about the moon's congealed matter and disc-like form show that agreement on the solar source of light need not imply agreement with every modern lunar model. The Ps.-Plutarch summary at A30 also assigns the moon light from the sun. At A55 Achilles introduces an Empedoclean verse incipit, but his surrounding account that the moon is a fragment broken from the sun is a further interpretive claim. Borrowing light does not by itself entail sharing that physical origin.

Places to read

1. A 60 (testimony)Aëtius, final notice. Attributes solar illumination of the moon to Empedocles within a list beginning with Thales.
2. A 59 (testimony)Aëtius. Gives the related but distinct role of the moon as the body intervening in a solar eclipse.
3. A 30 (testimony)Ps.-Plutarch, Stromateis, in Eusebius P.E. I 8,10. Says the moon obtains its light from the sun within a larger cosmogonic summary.
4. A 55 (quotation)Achilles, In Aratum 16 p. 43,2 Maass. Introduces the B45 verse incipit, which the edition expands in translation as light not its own.

Translation in this edition

The attribution of priority to Thales belongs to Aëtius' historical list. It is not a independently demonstrated chronology supplied by this edition, and the word “reflection” would be more specific than the printed clause.