From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordAtē can express ruinous error, delusion, or disaster.
- In EmpedoclesB121 describes Murder, Wrath, and the tribes of Dooms wandering in darkness through Ruin's meadow.
- In this editionThe English capitalizes Ruin as a name.
- A place to readRuin gives her name to the dark meadow traversed by destructive presences.
Meaning
Atē can express ruinous error, delusion, or disaster. Here the genitive makes a meadow the domain of Ruin. Leimōn supplies the meadow image, ordinarily a place of growth, which the surrounding darkness and destructive figures make unsettling.
Use in the book
B121 describes Murder, Wrath, and the tribes of Dooms wandering in darkness through Ruin's meadow. The name joins an ethical register of disastrous error to a landscape of suffering. Unlike a prose definition, the image allows place and condition to reinforce each other: the travellers are in a region characterized by what ruins life.
The surviving line does not say that Atē is an additional elemental force, explain whether she governs the inhabitants, or tell how someone escapes the meadow. Comparison with the exile caused by wrongdoing in B1152 is useful, but a causal statement connecting those scenes is absent. Nor should the meadow be confused with Aphrodite's “cloven meadows” in B66, whose local bodily context is quite different. A repeated landscape noun need not signify one shared location.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
The English capitalizes Ruin as a name. The Greek genitive identifies an association with the meadow; it does not alone resolve whether Ruin is imagined as its owner, ruler, or defining condition.