Strife

Use in the book

One collected fragment places Strife at the outermost edge as the roots come together. Another contrasts the union of all through Love with their dispersal through Strife. The doxographical notice explains cosmic coming-to-be and destruction by the alternating dominance of the two powers. The explanatory role of Strife therefore depends on its relation to the enduring constituents and the opposing power of union.

Places to read

1. I.10.11aStrife stands apart as the roots come together.
2. I.10.11b.2Strife is contrasted with Love’s unifying action.
3. I.20.1f.3Alternating dominance explains cosmic change.

Translation in this edition

Capital “Strife” indicates the named cosmic power. These physical contexts do not reduce it to moral wickedness or ordinary human disagreement.

Use in the book

The explicit contrast in B 172 is between coming together through Love and being borne separately through Strife. Strife stands apart from the four physical constituents and is balanced in every direction. This position is not a warrant to imagine a permanently external force which never enters bodies. B 30 says it is nourished within the limbs before rising to its honours, and B 352 says some remains within limbs while some has already departed. Spatial language changes with the phase and local conditions being described.

Strife's action is connected to differentiation. B 212 makes things distinct in form and apart in Wrath; B 22 attributes the extreme mutual unfamiliarity of some constituents or forms to Strife's prompting. Conversely, B 352's emergence of myriad mortal kinds occurs during Love's advance and Strife's incomplete retreat. Both passages resist the simplest opposition between creation by Love and absolute destruction by Strife. The foundational distinction is among unchanged constituents, changing combinations, and the disappearance of particular organised forms.

B 30 places the rise of Strife under a fulfilled time and a broad oath. Its dominance is therefore described as an appointed turn, not an unexpected accident breaking an otherwise permanent state of Love. The account leaves difficult questions of the cosmic sequence unresolved: the surviving fragments do not by themselves dictate one universally accepted timetable or number of world-formations.

The ethical dimension becomes explicit in B 1152, where the speaker calls himself an exile who trusted raving Strife. The poem's negative language is unmistakable, but one must not deduce from it that Strife is an extraneous evil which could simply be removed from the account of an enduring cosmos. B 16, as conventionally interpreted through its context, says time will never be emptied of the two powers. Nor does the speaker's relation to Strife give a complete definition of the daimon's substance.

The edition's modern introduction notes the epic resonance of “destructive.” That intertextual observation can illuminate the tone; it does not turn the quotation into an allegory of a specific Homeric character. The strongest reading keeps conflict's cosmic, bodily, and ethical registers in view together.

Places to read

1. B 17.7–8, 18–202Strife separates things and is distinguished from both the roots and Love.
2. B 30Strife grows within the limbs and rises to its appointed honours when time is fulfilled.
3. B 35.3–132Its withdrawal is incomplete, leaving different regions or limbs differently affected.
4. B 36As things join, Strife stands at the furthest edge.
5. B 115.13–14The exiled speaker identifies himself as one who trusted raving Strife.
6. B 109.3Strife is recognised by baleful strife.

Translation in this edition

“Strife” retains the personified and contentious force of the name. “Repulsion” loses too much, while “Hate” narrows the sense to psychology. The adjective oulomenon in B 172 belongs to the verse’s hostile tone; it does not supply a separate definition which makes Strife wholly external to the recurring order.

Use in the book

The simplest reported function is separation: A28 and A332 distinguish the dividing power from Love’s combining one. Aristotle complicates that description at A37 by pointing out that separating the unlike elements also gathers each like element into one mass. On that scale Strife combines. The objection is about whether a cause has a single unambiguous operation, not about whether the poem contains the name Strife.

Strife is also world-making in the cycle reports. Simplicius describes the separated elements forming a cosmos of the present kind, while Love gathers all into the Sphairos and destroys that cosmos. Aristotle’s second notice at A42 similarly calls the present world a world under Strife. Consequently a formula such as “Strife destroys, Love creates” is inadequate: the destruction of one arrangement can be the condition for the generation of another. Aristotle himself exempts only the elements from perishability at A52.

A39’s ethical mapping must be handled separately. Aristotle proposes that Strife causes evils and is, in a sense, the evil principle. His reconstruction is introduced through claims about what Empedocles means rather than what he articulates. The passage does not establish a fully developed moral dualism in Empedocles’ own terminology. A45 introduces still another relation by identifying necessity with Love and Strife together in Plutarch, whereas Aëtius seems to give necessity a causality over the principles.

What emerges securely is a power inseparable from the explanation of change and opposition. Its ontological standing, complete schedule of dominance, and ethical significance remain contested in the very evidence that preserves it.

Places to read

1. A 28 (testimony)Simplicius, Physics 25,21, from Theophrastus. Identifies Strife as the mover that separates the elements in alternating phases.
2. A 37 (polemical)Aristotle, Metaphysics A 4, 985a21. Points out that Strife’s separation of unlike constituents simultaneously combines like ones.
3. A 39 (polemical)Aristotle, Metaphysics A 4, 984b32. Interprets Strife as cause of evil in a moralized causal reconstruction.
4. A 52 (testimony)Simplicius, De caelo 293,18. Names the cosmos of Strife and describes Strife producing a present-kind world after separation.
5. A 33 (quotation)2Aëtius I 3,20, abbreviated citation of Empedocles B17.7–8. Preserves the ending ἔχθει, “in hatred,” within an abbreviated verse citation attached to the alternating powers.

Translation in this edition

“Strife” should retain its figurative and evaluative associations without letting those associations decide every causal or ethical question. The Greek name does not identify a modern physical force.