Zoogony

Use in the book

Empedocles makes the production of organisms intelligible within the same account of mixture that explains the rest of the world. Trees, men, women, beasts, birds, and fish are repeatedly listed together as products of the enduring constituents. Their variety comes from combination; living things do not require an additional material origin. The great passage B352 describes countless mortal tribes pouring forth as Love advances, while some constituents remain unmixed under Strife. This is an account of formation during a changing balance of powers, not a picture of a craftsman creating life from nothing.

The short biological fragments preserve sharply different scenes. In B57–582 parts exist separately and wander without the bodies in which readers ordinarily expect to find them. In B59 they encounter one another; B60–612 depict unusual combinations, including doubled bodies and human–bovine composites. B62 instead describes whole-natured forms rising from earth under the impulse of separating fire, still lacking differentiated limbs, voice, and the male member. These scenes must be distinguished before they are arranged into a history. The numerical order of the fragments cannot establish their original narrative sequence.

The introduction summarizes a four-phase scheme, ending with sexual differentiation and reproduction. It also reports both the ancient survival explanation associated with Aristotle and modern disagreement over reading it as an anticipation of natural selection. Those statements belong to the edition’s reconstruction and reception history. The quoted verses vividly attest separate parts, fortuitous encounters, strange combinations, and undifferentiated forms; they do not themselves lay out a continuous four-stage timetable or a recurring mechanism of inherited variation and selection.

The most secure interpretive result is therefore plural: Empedocles asks how living arrangements arise, uses both assembly and growth to explain them, and treats present bodily organization as something needing an account. He does not simply take the familiar organism as the starting unit. This makes the isolated arm, the unframed eye, and the sexually undifferentiated form philosophically consequential rather than decorative curiosities.

The language of birth also has to be read against B8–92. There the poet denies absolute birth and destruction and allows ordinary birth-language for the mixing of constituents into men, beasts, bushes, and birds. A zoogony consequently explains the arrival of organized mortal arrangements, not the creation of their ultimate materials. This distinction allows the strange early bodies to be genuinely new as compounds while their constituents remain continuous with what preceded them. The category “mortal things” is broader than animals, so the biological scenes belong within a general theory of transient formations.

B352 makes that perspective especially vivid by saying that what had been immortal grew mortal. The immediate argument concerns previously unmixed things entering mixture. It need not be converted into a literal biography in which every eternal root dies. What becomes perishable is the arrangement, a point that also helps distinguish the formation of a living body from the separate question of a daimon's passage through bodies.

Places to read

1. B 21.9–142Trees, human sexes, animals, and gods appear in one catalogue of generated compounds.
2. B 35.3–172Mixture under advancing Love produces countless mortal tribes of many shapes.
3. B 57Separate heads, arms, and eyes provide the most vivid evidence for generation from disjoined parts.
4. B 62Whole-natured forms supply a different scene of early human generation.
5. Introduction V (editorial discussion)The four-phase scheme and the discussion of selection are modern exposition, drawing on testimonia not printed as a separate corpus.

Translation in this edition

The editorial Book II heading and the B-number sequence are finding aids, not proof of original composition order. The introduction’s phrase “necks without heads” reverses B57: the printed Greek and translation give heads without necks. Neither this local mistake nor the introduction’s synthesis should displace the quoted evidence.