Empedocles — Fragments (On Nature; Purifications)
c. 490–430 BCE · Classical Greece (5th century BCE) · Akragas, Sicily (present-day Agrigento)
On Nature — The Four Roots
Love and Strife
The Sphere Under Love
The Cycle of the Elements
The Nature of Perception
Purifications — The Wandering Soul
The Cycle of Souls
The Final Vision
notes
Empedocles of Akragas (c. 490–430 BCE) was a philosopher, poet, statesman, physician, and reputed miracle-worker of Sicily. He composed two philosophical poems in hexameter — On Nature (Peri Physeos) and Purifications (Katharmoi) — of which some 450 lines survive. Whether these were two distinct works or one has been disputed since antiquity. Empedocles's central innovation was the doctrine of the four "roots" (rhizomata) of the cosmos — fire, air, water, earth — which combine and separate under the influence of two cosmic forces, Love (Philotes, harmony, attraction) and Strife (Neikos, discord, repulsion). This four-element cosmology, taken up by Aristotle and transmitted to medieval science, dominated European thought about the nature of matter for two thousand years. The Purifications develops a Pythagorean-influenced doctrine of the transmigration of souls: the philosopher is a fallen daimon, exiled from divinity and doomed to wander through many bodies (human, animal, plant) until purification permits the return to the divine. Legend held that Empedocles died by leaping into the crater of Mount Etna to prove himself a god — a story dismissed by many modern scholars but immortalised in poems by Matthew Arnold ("Empedocles on Etna," 1852) and Hölderlin. Translation: John Burnet, "Early Greek Philosophy," 2nd edition, London: A. & C. Black, 1908. Public domain.
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