From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordChōros is a place or region.
- In EmpedoclesIn B118 the first-person speaker weeps and wails at the sight of an unfamiliar place.
- In this edition“Unfamiliar” and “joyless” are distinct descriptions.
- A place to readThe speaker reacts to an unfamiliar region with weeping and wailing.
Meaning
Chōros is a place or region. B118 calls it unfamiliar; B121 calls a place joyless. Neither surviving expression literally says “birthplace.” That heading sometimes serves as an interpretation of the exile's arrival in mortal life, but should not be mistaken for the Greek wording.
Use in the book
In B118 the first-person speaker weeps and wails at the sight of an unfamiliar place. The response makes strangeness an experience of suffering. B121 presents a joyless region inhabited by Murder, Wrath, and other Dooms, who wander in darkness through Ruin's meadow. These pieces resonate with B1152's forced passage into mortal forms and B119's cry over lost honour. Such resonance supports reading mortal existence through estrangement and loss.
It does not, however, determine a precise moment of birth or identify the location as a subterranean Hades. The fragments survive as quotations and their ordering is editorial. Even the two pieces grouped as B121 are visibly discontinuous in this edition. The sound interpretation preserves the shared emotional landscape while declining to manufacture a continuous travel narrative.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
“Unfamiliar” and “joyless” are distinct descriptions. The present grouping does not certify that both refer to exactly the same location, and neither is the ordinary word for birth.