The Fragments of Empedocles: An Honest Review

🕑 15 min read

What This Book Is

What survives of Empedocles is around a hundred and fifty fragments, most of them short, quoted by later authors who wanted to argue with him, illustrate a point, or preserve a line they admired. Simplicius, writing in the sixth century AD, is the single most important source and appears to have had an actual copy of the poem in front of him, which is why the physical material survives in longer runs than most Presocratic writing.

The total is perhaps a tenth of what he wrote, possibly less. Any book called the Fragments of Empedocles is therefore a compilation, arranged by an editor according to a theory about how the pieces fit, and different editors arrange them differently.

He wrote in hexameter verse, the metre of Homer, which is itself a statement. Presenting natural philosophy in epic metre asserts that this material belongs in the same category as the poems that told a Greek audience who they were.

The Man From Acragas

Empedocles lived roughly from 494 to 434 BC in Acragas, a wealthy Greek city on the south coast of Sicily, now Agrigento, where the temples he would have known still stand.

The biographical tradition, which is late and unreliable, describes an aristocrat who took the popular side in politics, was offered kingship and refused it, wore purple and a golden crown, and was followed in the street. He was a physician of some reputation and, according to Aristotle, the inventor of rhetoric.

Two things about the setting matter for reading him. Sicily was culturally distinct from mainland Greece, with strong local cults and a long tradition of healers and seers. And Empedocles is roughly a generation after Pythagoras, whose community had operated in southern Italy, and whose teachings on transmigration and dietary restriction Empedocles clearly knew.

The Four Roots

Empedocles calls them roots, rhizomata, not elements. The word element in this sense is later.

Fire, air, water and earth. Four things, ungenerated and indestructible, which mix in varying proportions to produce everything we encounter. Nothing is ever born and nothing dies; what we call birth is mixture and what we call death is separation, and Empedocles says the ordinary language is a convention he will use while knowing better.

He names them with divine names, which the sources report inconsistently, and this ambiguity is deliberate. The roots are not inert stuff. They are described as divine, as having their own honours, and as being addressed in the language of gods.

The reason this scheme lasted two thousand years is that it solved a real problem. Parmenides had argued that what is cannot come to be or perish, which appeared to make change impossible. Empedocles accepts the constraint completely at the level of the roots and recovers change at the level of mixture. Four permanent things, endlessly recombining, gives you a world that changes without anything coming from nothing.

He also gives a proportional account of composition that is startlingly specific. Bone, he says, is two parts earth, two parts water and four parts fire. A recipe, in a poem, in the fifth century BC.

Love and Strife

The roots do not move themselves. Two forces act on them.

Love, which he also calls Aphrodite and Kypris and Harmony, draws unlike things together. Strife drives like to like and separates them.

The moral reading is available and it is wrong, or at least incomplete, and Empedocles is careful about this. Total Love produces the Sphairos, a perfect motionless sphere in which everything is united and nothing is distinguishable. There are no living things in it, no perception, no events. Total Strife produces four separated masses, equally empty of anything happening.

The world we are in, with its distinct beings and its perception and its change, exists only in the transition between those extremes. It is a product of the conflict rather than of either party winning. That is a more sophisticated idea than the names suggest, and it is closer to Heraclitus on strife than the surface opposition implies.

The Cosmic Cycle

The two forces alternate in dominance over immense stretches of time, and the resulting cycle is the framework for everything else.

Love increases until it has drawn all four roots into the Sphairos. Then Strife, which has been at the edges, enters and begins to separate. Separation increases until the roots are wholly apart. Then Love begins again, and the cycle repeats.

How exactly our world fits into this is one of the great unresolved problems in the study of early Greek philosophy, and the honest thing is to say so. Does a world like ours occur once per cycle, or twice, once during increasing Strife and once during increasing Love? Is our zoogony, the making of living things, happening as Love gathers or as Strife divides? The fragments can be read either way and scholars have argued the point for well over a century without settling it.

This is not a minor detail. Where you place the present moment in the cycle determines whether things are currently getting more unified or more separated, which changes the meaning of the whole religious teaching.

The Wandering Limbs

Then there is the passage nobody forgets.

Empedocles describes a stage in which body parts existed before bodies. Many heads sprang up without necks. Bare arms wandered, without shoulders. Eyes strayed about, in need of foreheads.

These parts then combined, at random, as they met. Some of the results were monstrous: creatures with faces on both sides, cattle with human faces, human forms with the heads of oxen, beings that were neither male nor female or that were both.

And then the part that matters. The combinations that were incapable of feeding themselves, or of reproducing, or of surviving, did not persist. What we see now is what happened to work.

As a piece of imagination it is unmatched in ancient literature. As a piece of reasoning it is doing something serious: explaining apparent design without a designer, by proposing that the appearance of fitness is a residue left after unfit combinations were eliminated.

Why He Is Not Darwin

Aristotle noticed the resemblance to a selection argument and rejected it, and modern readers keep rediscovering it and overstating it. The comparison needs handling carefully in both directions.

What is genuinely there: the idea that fitness need not be designed, and that survival can do explanatory work that purpose was thought to be required for. That is a real and remarkable anticipation.

What is not there: heredity, which is the whole engine. Empedocles has no account of offspring resembling parents, no variation arising within a lineage, and no accumulation over generations. His mechanism is a single episode of random assembly followed by elimination, not an ongoing process. There is no descent with modification because there is no descent in the relevant sense.

Calling him a proto-Darwinian therefore flatters him in the wrong currency. The impressive thing is not that he half-guessed a nineteenth-century theory. It is that in the fifth century BC he saw that apparent purpose might be an artefact of what failed to persist, and that this is a thought you can have without any of the machinery.

The Exiled Spirit

Alongside all this runs a religious teaching that would be strange in any other physicist.

There is an oath, and a decree of necessity, and a daimon, a divine spirit, that has defiled its hands with blood or followed Strife and sworn falsely. Such a spirit is banished from the blessed for thirty thousand seasons, and is born through time into every kind of mortal shape, passing from one hard path of life to another.

Empedocles applies this to himself. He says he is an exile from the gods and a wanderer, trusting in raving Strife. And in one of the most quoted lines in Greek philosophy he says that he has already been, at some time, a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a mute fish in the sea.

From this follow the practical prohibitions: against killing animals, against eating flesh, and against beans, which he shares with the Pythagorean tradition. If souls transmigrate through animal bodies, then slaughtering an animal is potentially killing a relative, and Empedocles says so in explicitly horrified terms, describing a father lifting up his transformed son and slaughtering him with a prayer.

I Go Among You as a God

And then the opening of what antiquity called the Purifications, addressed to the citizens of Acragas.

He greets them, says he goes among them as an immortal god and no longer as a mortal, honoured as is fitting, crowned with ribbons and garlands, and that when he enters their prosperous towns crowds follow, asking the way to profit and seeking oracles and cures.

Nothing else quite like this survives from a Greek philosopher, and readers have found it embarrassing for two and a half thousand years.

There are three defensible readings and no way to choose between them. It may be a personal claim, in which case he thought he had completed the purification and returned to divine status. It may be a ritual or performative persona, spoken in a religious setting where the speaker takes the voice of the purified soul, as happens in mystery contexts. Or it may be generic, describing what any soul that has completed the cycle can say, with Empedocles speaking as an example rather than as an exception.

The fragments give no context, because contexts are exactly what quotation destroys. Anyone who tells you confidently which of the three is correct is going beyond the evidence.

One Poem or Two

Ancient sources refer to a poem On Nature and a poem called Purifications, and for most of the modern period editors treated them as two separate works: physics in one, religion in the other.

That division was always convenient and always slightly suspicious. It let scholars treat the rational Empedocles and the shamanic Empedocles as separable, assign the fragments they liked to one work and the fragments they found awkward to the other, and avoid the question of how one man held both.

The alternative view holds that the two titles may refer to one work, or to parts of one work, and that the physics and the religion are a single argument in which the cosmology explains why purification is necessary and what it consists of.

Brad Inwood argued the single-poem case at length. The question was genuinely open when a piece of physical evidence arrived.

What the Papyrus Changed

In 1999 Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi published papyrus fragments that had been acquired in Egypt early in the twentieth century and had sat unidentified in Strasbourg for decades.

They were Empedocles. The publication added a substantial run of new lines, the largest single addition to the surviving text of any Presocratic philosopher in modern times, and it overlapped with known fragments in ways that allowed their placement to be checked.

The important consequence was not the new content but what it showed about register. The papyrus contains first-person and personal language inside material that is unmistakably physical, which is precisely the combination the two-poem division had been used to avoid. It became much harder to maintain that Empedocles wrote about the roots in one voice and about the soul in another.

The argument is not over. What changed is that the burden shifted, and any serious treatment of Empedocles written before 1999 now has to be read with that in mind.

The Volcano Story

Everyone knows how Empedocles died, and nobody knows how Empedocles died.

The famous version comes from Diogenes Laertius, writing around seven centuries later and collecting whatever he found. In it, Empedocles climbs Mount Etna and throws himself into the crater, intending to disappear and confirm that he had become a god. The volcano then throws up one of his bronze sandals, and the deception is exposed.

Read the structure of that story. It is not a report; it is a joke at the expense of a man who claimed divinity, and the sandal is the punchline. Diogenes also records several other versions, including a death in the Peloponnese and a fall from a carriage, which is what a compiler does when the tradition has no idea.

The story took hold anyway, and it gave Matthew Arnold a long dramatic poem in 1852 and gave every subsequent writer a convenient image. It is one of the clearest cases in ancient biography of a legend outliving the evidence entirely, and it is worth carrying as a caution about how the lives of early philosophers reach us.

The Magician Reading

One further debate should be flagged, because readers coming from esoteric literature will encounter it.

Peter Kingsley's Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic, published by Oxford in 1995, argues that the standard picture of Empedocles as a Sicilian rationalist with some odd religious opinions gets him backwards. On Kingsley's reading he belongs to a tradition of healers, seers and underworld specialists, his physics is inseparable from magical practice, and later Greek philosophy systematically obscured that inheritance.

The book is learned and it is a minority position. Specialists have accepted parts of the case, particularly regarding the Sicilian religious context and the ways later doxography flattened it, and have resisted the stronger claims. Kingsley's later and more popular books are considerably less careful than the 1995 study and are not a reliable guide to the fragments.

The honest summary is that Kingsley identified something real about the setting, that the reconstruction he builds on it goes beyond what the evidence supports, and that a reader should engage with the argument rather than either adopting or dismissing it wholesale.

Which Edition to Read

M. R. Wright's Empedocles: The Extant Fragments is the standard critical edition, with Greek text, translation and detailed commentary, and it is where serious study starts.

Brad Inwood's The Poem of Empedocles gives text and facing translation with an introduction arguing the single-poem position, and is more accessible.

The Loeb Early Greek Philosophy volume edited by André Laks and Glenn Most incorporates the Strasbourg material and represents the current state of the evidence, with Greek and English facing.

Cheap public-domain editions, including the one linked below, generally reprint an early twentieth-century verse translation. They are pleasant to read, they predate the papyrus by ninety years, and they carry an arrangement of the fragments that reflects assumptions since questioned. Fine for a first encounter, not for study.

For the philosophical assessment, Jonathan Barnes treats Empedocles in The Presocratic Philosophers, formalising the arguments and testing them, which is a useful counterweight to the mystical readings.

Frequently Asked Questions