From the book
Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordThe phrase rendered “wing-faring boats” names birds through a vessel image in B20.
- In EmpedoclesThe image concludes a list of living forms: bushes, water-housed fish, mountain-lying beasts, and the wing-faring boats.
- In this edition“Wing-faring” is deliberately unusual English.
- A place to readThe phrase closes the catalogue extending bodily joining and division across living kinds.
Meaning
The phrase rendered “wing-faring boats” names birds through a vessel image in B20. The compound emphasizes movement by wings; the noun turns the moving animal into a small craft. No ordinary word for bird appears in this particular phrase.
Use in the book
The image concludes a list of living forms: bushes, water-housed fish, mountain-lying beasts, and the wing-faring boats. Each receives a sharply characterized setting or mode of life. Fish have watery dwellings, beasts lie in mountains, and birds travel through their medium like vessels. The phrase is therefore both an identification and a miniature account of how the animal moves.
The larger argument concerns bodily unity through Love and disaggregation through Quarrels. The list extends the pattern beyond human limbs. A bird is not exempt because its mode of travel looks different from that of a terrestrial beast; its distinctive body is another compound subject to joining and separation.
The nautical metaphor also gives a useful counterpart to the “human prow” in B61’s hybrid creatures. There the front of a body is described as a vessel’s leading part; here the whole bird becomes a craft. Neither passage implies that animals are artificial machines. The shared vocabulary exposes the poet’s interest in functional arrangements of parts while keeping the beings vividly alive.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
“Wing-faring” is deliberately unusual English. Replacing the entire phrase with “birds” would identify the referent but lose the concrete craft metaphor that makes the expression worth indexing.