Wind-staying

Use in the book

The promised mastery is bidirectional. The hearer will be able to halt damaging wind but also restore breezes if desired, produce dry conditions from dark rain, and bring nourishing moisture in summer drought. The ideal is not a world without wind or water. It is the timely ordering of environmental forces in relation to human and agricultural needs.

The passage's qualification “if you wish” is part of the claim to intentional control. It distinguishes the promise from the general accounts of rain, sun, and air elsewhere in the poems. No engineering method is stated. The verse does not describe bags, barriers, river-diversion works, or a specific ceremony.

The introduction relates the later story that Empedocles stopped winds around Acragas with ass-hide bags and acquired the epithet kōlysanemas, wind-stayer. It explicitly warns that B 1112 is likely a source of the legend rather than confirmation of an independently documented feat. The epithet is supplied in transliteration by the introduction, not printed as a Greek word in the poem.

Read within the larger sequence of B 1112, weather control links the cure of bodily trouble with the protection of cultivated land and the prospect of return from death. Its force is to display the scope of instruction. It remains a historical claim made by the poetic speaker, without modern verification or practical instructions.

Places to read

1. B 111.3–82Control of wind and rainfall is articulated in both destructive and beneficial directions.
2. Introduction I (editorial discussion)The wind-stayer legend and epithet are explained as potentially dependent on the verse.

Translation in this edition

The edition's “requiting breezes” preserves the unusual retaliatory or returning force of the adjective instead of silently making all restored winds gentle. The agricultural standard is explicit in the damaged ploughlands and tree-nourishing streams.

Use in the book

Timaeus’ reported version explains the name through asses’ hides stretched over hills and headlands during damaging Etesian winds. Plutarch instead describes closing mountain clefts against a heavy, disease-bearing south wind. Clement retains the harmful wind and epithet but not the construction; the Suda moves the hides around the city. Nicomachus needs no mechanical account at all: the epithet proves extraordinary powers shared with Pythagorean holy figures. These variations demonstrate different uses of a reputation, not a securely reconstructed chronological progression from engineering to miracle. Earlier source material may survive inside a later compiler, and a more practical narrative is not automatically older or more accurate. The common core is a remembered or imagined capacity to protect a community from atmospheric harm. Crop loss, epidemic illness, and reproductive difficulty vary with the account and should not be fused into a single observed event.

The causal structures also differ. In the hide-bag version, the wind ceases after deployment and the nickname follows. In Plutarch, the clefts explain the route of a harmful airflow and blocking them accounts for protection of the plain. Clement reports the result with no material means. Nicomachus reads the epithet itself as a sign of power. Each version leaves a different evidential gap: temporal succession is not by itself proof of causation, a plausible construction is not proof of a particular historical project, and an epithet cannot independently verify the event it supposedly commemorates.

The harms named in these stories are equally worth preserving. Ruined crops, unhealthy air, plague, and reproductive difficulty are different outcomes. Plutarch’s Against Colotes even couples atmospheric protection with prosecution of elite misconduct, making Empedocles useful to the city both politically and environmentally. The same figure can consequently appear as practical benefactor, physician, holy man, or marvel-worker according to the witness’s purpose. Those categories describe the reception frame rather than force a choice that one version must contain the complete historical explanation.

The poetic background is also indirect. The Life associates these stories with a fragment promising powers over weather and death, but its actual citation is abbreviated. A promise in a poem can have inspired an anecdote, an anecdote can have shaped the reading of a poem, or both can reflect an already established reputation; the dossier does not choose among those pathways. The responsible lexical result is to document the two epithet forms and the explanations attached to them, while leaving the historical mechanism and direction of narrative development unresolved.

Places to read

1. A 1 §§ 59–60 (biography)Diogenes Laertius VIII 60, reporting Timaeus, Histories XVIII. Explains the epithet through hide-bags and Etesian winds.
2. A 13–A 14 (biography)Plutarch, On Being a Busybody; Against Colotes. Gives mountain-blocking versions with an unhealthy south wind.
3. A 13–A 14 (legend)Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies; Nicomachus, on the wonders of Pythagoras. Preserves the harmful-wind tale and the wonder-working epithet in different forms.
4. A 2 (legend)The Suda. Places the hides around Acragas.

Translation in this edition

The edition’s claim that the simplest version is earliest and supplies the historical original is not established by the dossier. The Timaeus material has an earlier named source than the surviving Plutarch texts, even though Diogenes transmits it later.