From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordPlouton is wealth, used metaphorically of understanding.
- In EmpedoclesB 129 praises an unnamed man whose knowledge, understanding, and wise works exceed those of others.
- In this editionThe attribution of B 129 to Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras is apparatus evidence for its reception.
- A place to readAn unnamed man has abundant understanding and extraordinary reach across human lifetimes.
Meaning
Plouton is wealth, used metaphorically of understanding. B 129 speaks of the wealth of prapides; B 132 calls it divine. Skotoessa, dark, qualifies the contrasting opinion about gods in B 132.
Use in the book
B 129 praises an unnamed man whose knowledge, understanding, and wise works exceed those of others. Whenever he reaches out with all his understanding, he can look upon each of the things that are across ten and twenty human lifetimes. The passage represents exceptional cognitive range in the language of acquired riches and extended vision. It does not explain how that capacity works.
Porphyry preserves the lines in his Life of Pythagoras, which gives the identification of the remarkable man an obvious ancient setting. The quoted verses themselves do not name him. “Pythagoras” is therefore an important lookup connection, but the reader should be told whether it comes from the witness's context or from Empedocles' surviving words. Nor should the number of lifetimes be turned into a precise schedule of recollected incarnations: the lines emphasize extraordinary reach, without narrating a numbered sequence of earlier lives.
B 132 employs the same wealth-image in an explicitly evaluative contrast. Blessed is the person who possesses divine understanding; wretched is the one absorbed in dark opinion about gods. Cognition has consequences for the condition of a life, and the difference between knowledge and inadequate belief is figured as abundance versus obscurity. This passage does not itself identify the possessor with the man of B 129.
The acquisitive metaphor also connects to B 110, where attentive study lets a learner gain further things from what is already held. The accumulation is generative rather than a static hoard. Together these passages enlarge the poem's account of learning beyond the initial limitations of mortal perception, while leaving the grounds of the most exceptional claims partly obscure.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
The attribution of B 129 to Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras is apparatus evidence for its reception. It is not a surviving vocative or name inside the Empedoclean quotation. B 132's “divine” can characterize the understanding without requiring one predetermined doctrine of possession by a god.