From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordB68 names a white πύον, translated “discharge,” and dates its appearance to the tenth of the eighth month.
- In EmpedoclesThis miniature fragment is strikingly specific about timing and strikingly incomplete about its subject.
- In this editionThe English “discharge” leaves the fluid’s identity open.
- A place to readThe single verse gives the time and whiteness of an otherwise unnamed discharge.
Meaning
B68 names a white πύον, translated “discharge,” and dates its appearance to the tenth of the eighth month. The substance is described by colour and by a developmental time, but the excerpt does not name the body or organ from which it comes.
Use in the book
This miniature fragment is strikingly specific about timing and strikingly incomplete about its subject. Aristotle’s Generation of Animals is given as the witness, placing the quotation within an ancient discussion of generation. The source reference is relevant evidence about transmission; it is not a substitute for the omitted sentence surrounding Empedocles' line.
The responsible interpretation preserves that asymmetry. The verse attests an attempt to assign a bodily process to a definite point in a sequence of months and days. It does not, as printed here, tell the reader from what event the months are counted. Calling the fluid semen, milk, or a dental secretion would therefore go beyond the supplied wording and local apparatus.
The seven-week report provides another example of developmental timing, but it survives through a different author, in prose, and with a different claim. The two numbers should not be reconciled by assuming that they describe the same event. A lexicon records both without building an unsupported embryological calendar.
Places to read
- B 68The single verse gives the time and whiteness of an otherwise unnamed discharge.
- B 153a (report)Theon reports seven-week completion of an embryo, a separate timing claim.
Translation in this edition
The English “discharge” leaves the fluid’s identity open. That restraint is worth preserving: neither the fragment nor the book’s note supplies a narrower physiological identification.