Empedocles Lexicon

Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

Introduction

Empedocles calls the four enduring constituents of things roots, rhizōmata. Fire, water, earth, and air combine and separate under Love and Strife; what people call birth and death is the making and unmaking of their mixtures. This lexicon follows that vocabulary through the supplied bilingual edition, giving the physical account, the divine names, the poetry of perception, and the language of exile and purification their own space. Its 202 articles are intended for close reading rather than a replacement for the fragments.

Roots before Plato

The crucial place is B 6, where the four roots are named Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis. The elemental list is explicit in B 17.18. Matching every god to an individual root is another matter: the ancient reports disagree, and modern interpretations remain divided. Nestis is most securely associated with water. The articles on the roots and each divine name retain the uncertainty rather than printing an apparently definitive key.

Empedocles precedes Plato. Aristotle later credits him with specifying four material constituents, against a background of earlier thinkers who had proposed other originating principles. Calling them roots preserves Empedocles' own attested expression; calling them elements uses a later technical vocabulary. This does not mean that Plato merely renamed the same theory. In the Timaeus, Plato gives the four bodies geometrical structures and permits transformations among fire, air, and water; Empedocles' roots remain themselves through their changing combinations. The comparison belongs to the history of reception, not to a concealed Platonic definition of Empedocles.

What the references mean

A reference such as B 17.18–24 means fragment B 17, lines 18–24, in the supplied text. The traditional full designation is DK 31 B 17: 31 identifies Empedocles in Diels–Kranz and B identifies the quotation series. The fragments are preserved quotations or reports, not chapters that Empedocles numbered. The order of surviving pieces and their allocation to poems are editorial questions. Even a B-number does not guarantee verbatim verse: the reports at B 92, B 94, B 151–153a require particular caution.

The passage index supplies the relevant physical PDF pages of the supplied bilingual edition, counting its cover as page 1. These are source-file page numbers, not the pagination of this companion. Greek and English usually occupy facing pages. The fragment references remain the principal locators for readers using the reflowable Markdown edition.

Every article has five parts. The word explains the expression and its historically relevant sense. In Empedocles follows its work in the surviving text. The places gives annotated passages. In this edition identifies a translation choice, an uncertainty, or a distinction between verse and editorial explanation. See also connects related articles. The original-form and alias index accepts Greek spellings, transliterations, and English alternatives; the passage and thematic indexes offer different routes through the same material. Links work in the digital editions, with checked print-page references in the PDF and Word indexes. Word page locators are fixed to the delivered layout; edits or font substitutions can change pagination.

The supplied edition and its limits

The PDF cover reads Empedocles of Acragas: The Complete Fragments, a bilingual edition with the Greek text of Hermann Diels and a new English translation. Its companion Markdown metadata calls it Empedocles of Acragas — Volume I: The Poems. The translator is unnamed in the supplied files. This lexicon identifies its evidence by those files and their B-numbers; it does not attribute the new English to Diels.

The supplied text retains a Diels-based Greek text and numbering while arranging the fragments under a proem, three books of On Nature, Purifications, and uncertain placement. Its introductory discussion itself warns that this arrangement is interpretive. The label “complete” on the cover should not be understood as completeness of the modern corpus: the edition explicitly excludes the Strasbourg and Cairo papyrus texts and most testimonia, and it omits B 154–157 while including the doubtful B 158. Articles discussing these absences concern the edition's apparatus, not unprinted lines of the poet.

The commentary is useful but is not infallible. Where its generalizations conflict with the printed fragment, this companion distinguishes the two. For example, B 57 describes heads without necks, whereas the introduction reverses the image; the translation policy for mētis is not followed consistently; and the introduction's claim about a uniquely plural witness for B 115 is contradicted by other source lists in the same book. These are reader-facing cautions, not a newly constituted critical text. The five-part articles preserve corruptions, supplements, uncertain attributions, and the difference between a witness's interpretation and the quoted words.

Greek forms are given with transliteration for access. Historical meanings do not license speculative etymologies, modern scientific identities, or the assumption that a poetic personification has an independently recoverable biography. In particular, daimōn is not silently made into Plato's immaterial soul, Love and Strife are not reduced to modern forces, and the surviving images of generation are not treated as a statement of Darwinian evolution.

Sources for the historical comparison

The primary frame is the supplied Greek and English fragments and their individual ancient-source notices. For the explicitly marked comparison with Plato and Aristotle, consult Aristotle, Metaphysics A 3–4, especially 984a8–11 and 985a31–33, and Plato, Timaeus 31b–32c, 48b–c, and 53c–57c. These passages support the contrast without assigning a Platonic geometrical system to Empedocles.

Source note

Aristotle's attribution is a historical judgment, not proof that Empedocles originated every discussion of elemental principles. Primary translations are available in Aristotle Metaphysics Book I and Plato Timaeus. The history of technical stoicheion is debated; this companion makes no claim that Plato invented the word itself.

Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

A lexicon of witnesses

This lexicon is a reading companion to Empedocles of Acragas Volume II The Testimonia, the supplied edition presenting Greek and Latin attributed to Hermann Diels together with a new English translation and notes. Its 359 articles explain the significant words, technical expressions, images, persons, practices and interpretive distinctions encountered in that volume. It follows the same five-part article structure as the companion to Volume I, while changing the central question: here the reader must ask not only what a word means, but whose word it is.

The source is a collection of evidence about Empedocles. A sentence in Aristotle, an epitomized doxographical notice, a story in Diogenes Laertius, and a line of Milton have different purposes and cannot simply be added together into a single doctrine. Several passages do quote Empedoclean verse, notwithstanding the supplied edition's sweeping statement that nothing in the book is Empedocles' own words. The articles distinguish those embedded quotations from the testimony surrounding them. Neither every ancient report nor every modern explanation is silently treated as a fragment.

The primary scope is the whole supplied volume: the Life and associated notices at A 1–25; principles, cosmology and the cycle at A 26–56; light, weather, plants, animals and bodies at A 57–85; perception and thought at A 86–98; and both reception appendices. A 69a is an additional numbered notice. A 1 and A 86 are divided into the edition's smaller section groups. The work's introduction, sectional summaries and apparatus are also examined, but their modern interpretations remain marked as editorial material. References to B fragments arise where this volume itself mentions or quotes them; they do not turn this book into a second edition of Volume I.

How an article works

The word gives the headword's sense and, where supported by the source, its original-language forms. The English heading is a finding aid. It need not be the editor's preferred translation or a technical expression coined by Empedocles. Greek forms are given with readable transliterations; inflected forms may be retained when that is what the witness actually prints. Latin and, in the reception appendix, Italian are included where relevant. English terms in the later English poems require no reconstructed Greek equivalent.

In this work explains how the term functions in the cited evidence. An argument against Empedocles is described as an argument, not silently converted into the doctrine it seeks to refute. A biographical anecdote is a report or legend, even where its narrative is vivid. A modern literary transformation is reception, not evidence for the philosopher's life.

The places supplies annotated references. Each citation names the volume's stable A number or appendix location and its witness, and links to the native reader. A citation's label indicates its evidentiary layer: quotation, testimony, polemical argument, biography, legend, reception or apparatus. These labels describe the use being made of the passage; a long source unit may contain more than one layer. The annotation explains what the passage contributes rather than merely listing it.

In this edition identifies a translation choice, textual qualification or interpretive problem specific to that article. This section is especially important where the apparatus records a supplement, emendation, rearrangement or uncertain attribution. It also separates the supplied edition's confident narrative from what its printed evidence establishes.

See also gives linked routes to related articles. These are relations of contrast as well as agreement. Love and Strife, for example, may lead to an account of mixture, but that does not mean every witness uses those terms in the same way. Supplementary notes follow the relevant articles.

Reference conventions

A references retain the supplied volume's Diels–Kranz numbering. They are not chronological positions in Empedocles' original compositions. Grouped labels such as A 8–A 10 or A 1 §§ 53–55 reproduce the edition's headings; the witness name and annotation identify the particular notice within them. The book's Greek or Latin and its English commonly occupy facing pages, and some dossiers continue over several openings. Passage links lead to the corresponding evidence in the book.

The passage index gathers the articles under those source units, retaining their evidentiary labels. The original-forms index includes Greek expressions, transliterations, Latin and Italian forms, and English aliases. The thematic index provides overlapping routes through the material. Its categories are aids made for this lexicon, not ancient divisions attributed to Empedocles. The indexes lead to the relevant articles.

Reading across the witnesses

Aristotle frequently redescribes earlier thinkers through his own distinctions between matter, form, moving cause and explanation. His objections are valuable evidence for his reading of Empedocles, but the terminology of the objection is not automatically Empedocles' terminology. The same caution applies when Theophrastus distinguishes a faculty from an instrument or asks whether a cause is intrinsic or incidental. Those distinctions structure the later critical argument.

Aëtius notices in this volume are compact doxographical reports transmitted through a reconstructed tradition. Their brevity can suppress the argument that once connected the conclusions. Where a notice agrees with another witness, agreement does not itself prove independent attestation. Simplicius, Hippolytus, Plutarch and the medical writers likewise have their own philosophical, religious or professional purposes. The lexicon names those purposes only where the supplied evidence supports them; it does not rank all witnesses by a single formula.

Biography requires a related discipline. Diogenes Laertius preserves competing genealogies, chronological calculations, philosophical affiliations and deaths. The alternatives remain alternatives. A story's inclusion does not prove that Diogenes accepted it, and an ancient criticism of a legend does not establish every fact of a competing narrative. Political equality, spectacular dress, medicine and ritual can be studied as distinct features of the testimony without turning their combination into an unqualified portrait.

The appendices show later authors transforming the inherited material. Lucretius joins praise to criticism; Dante places the philosopher within a Christian poem and evokes a doctrine of cosmic Love; Milton and Arnold give different meanings to the crater story. None of these literary choices verifies the leap into Etna. Their language belongs to their respective works.

Textual cautions that change interpretation

The articles preserve several disagreements that the supplied commentary sometimes smooths out. The divine names in A 33 receive incompatible elemental mappings. The proposed symmetry of the cosmic cycle requires interpretation: the printed Simplicius passage at A 52 expressly names a cosmos of Strife and the Sphairos, while the edition's explanatory note goes further in its language of two cosmoi. A 51's accounts of the heavenly substance are not identical. Repetition is not unanimity.

Other problems arise between the original-language text and its presentation. At A 32 the supplied English reverses the direction of dissolution expressed by the supplemented Greek clause concerning the Sphairos. At A 1 § 61 the reading rendered as absence of pulse is an emendation beside alternatives concerning decay or food. At A 78 the recipes for tissues incorporate substantial textual reconstruction, including repair by reference to the verse on bone. They must not be counted as wholly independent, untouched numerical confirmation of that verse. The articles on the Sphairos, the breathless woman, bone and ratio explain these issues at their own locations.

The biology also preserves real tensions. At A 70 the reports do not uniformly attribute sensation to plants. The habitat account at A 72 and the explanation of fiery aquatic creatures at A 73 use different explanatory relations. Rather than inventing a lost solution, the lexicon makes the competing statements visible. The same principle governs the extensive objections in A 86: an objection may reveal an explanatory gap without proving that the original poem contained no response.

This is a comprehensive interpretive lexicon, not a token-by-token grammatical concordance. Articles are separated when a term has a distinctive sense, image, argument or evidentiary problem. Function words, incidental repetitions and every name in a passing list do not require independent articles. Conversely, minor but consequential details are not hidden inside broad headings merely to keep the book short. The aim is to make the volume searchable at the level where its evidence actually changes meaning.