Empedocles

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On the southern coast of Sicily, where the temples of Akragas still stand on their ridge above the sea, a man walked the streets in a purple robe, a bronze girdle at his waist and a garland of bay in his hair, and a crowd of attendants walked behind him. He healed the sick, he was credited with stilling a plague and turning back a wind, and he wrote his philosophy in hexameters good enough that Aristotle would call him the father of rhetoric and Lucretius, centuries later, would praise the godlike voice of his verse. Empedocles of Akragas — born about 494 and dead about 434 BCE — was at once the most thoroughgoing physicist of his generation and a prophet who told men he was a god come down among them. The two faces are not a contradiction to be explained away. They are the whole of him.

Imagined portrait of Empedocles, a line engraving of 1580 — unknown engraver, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He was a citizen of one of the richest cities of Magna Graecia, the Greater Greece of the western colonies, and he lived its public life: a partisan of the people against the old landed houses, a physician whose cures his countrymen held to be more than human, an orator, a poet. The biographical detail is thin and much of it is plainly read backward out of his own verses — the refusal of a crown offered by the city, the troop of followers, the diadems. What survives under his name with any security is two poems in fragments, the natural- philosophical On Nature (Peri Physeos) addressed to a young man named Pausanias, and the Purifications (Katharmoi), a poem of the soul’s fall and return. Whether these are two works or one is among the live questions of the field, and the answer changes how the whole figure is read.

The Temple of Concordia in the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento, the ancient Akragas of Empedocles — Fernando de Gorocica, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The four roots

Empedocles begins from a problem set by Parmenides. The Eleatic had argued that what is cannot come from what is not, that being is ungenerated and imperishable, and that change and plurality are therefore illusions of mortal opinion: there is no real birth and no real death, only the one changeless What-Is. The argument is hard to answer and impossible to ignore. Empedocles does not try to refute it. He accepts its core — nothing comes to be from nothing, nothing that is can pass into sheer non-being — and then asks what the world must be made of if that premise holds and yet the world manifestly moves and changes and dies.

His answer is the four roots, the rhizōmata: earth, water, air, and fire, four distinct stuffs that are each, severally, exactly what Parmenides said being must be — uncreated, indestructible, full, equal. They neither come into existence nor perish. What looks to mortals like the birth of a thing is the mingling of the roots; what looks like death is their parting. There is no coming-to-be of any mortal thing, on this account, and no end of it in baneful death; there is only mixture, and the exchange of what has been mixed, and a name laid over the process by men who call it birth. The roots themselves abide. The world is saved for change by being broken into four, and each of the four is saved for being by being kept whole. It is the founding move of pluralist physics: take the indestructible One of Elea, set four of it side by side, and let mixture do the work that generation used to do.

Empedocles names the four under divine titles — Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, the last a watery goddess, probably a Sicilian face of Persephone, whose tears are the springs of mortal life. The matching of god to element is itself unsettled, and was already disputed in antiquity. The common reading gives Zeus to fire, Hera to air, Aidoneus (a rare name for Hades) to earth, and Nestis to water; an old alternative makes Hades the earth and Hera the air; and the mystical-minded reading argued in the twentieth century by Peter Kingsley flips the bright gods toward the dark, giving fire to Hades of the underworld fires. The dispute is not pedantry. It turns on whether Empedocles meant the names as ornament, as cult-correspondence, or as a deliberate theology in which the physical roots and the gods of the city are one thing seen twice. The fragments do not settle it.

Love and Strife

Four passive stuffs cannot move themselves. Empedocles supplies two powers that do the moving: Love and Strife. Love — Philotēs, also Philia, sometimes named Aphrodite or Harmonia — is the force of mixture, drawing the unlike together so that out of the roots arise blood and bone and leaf and limb. Strife — Neikos — is the force of separation, driving the roots apart, sorting like to like until the four lie unmixed and alone. These are not metaphors for human feeling laid over a dead cosmos; they are cosmic agents, as real and as elemental as the roots they govern, and the whole history of the world is the record of their contest.

That history runs as a cycle. At the height of Love’s dominion the four roots are blended so perfectly that no single thing can be told from another: there is only the Sphere, the Sphairos, a rounded god rejoicing in its own circular solitude, with Strife shut out beyond its edge. Then Strife begins to enter, and as it works inward the blend breaks: the roots separate, and in the separating — neither at perfect union nor at perfect division but in the moving between — the world of distinct mortal things comes to be, ourselves among them. Strife at last prevails, the four lie wholly sundered, and then the motion reverses: Love returns, draws the parted roots together again, and the cosmos of separate beings arises a second time on the way back up toward the Sphere. Empedocles calls this, in the poem’s own image, a twofold tale — at one time the many grow into one, at another the one divides into many — and the becoming and perishing of things are themselves double, belonging to both the gathering and the scattering. How many worlds the cycle yields, and whether living things arise in one phase or in both, were debated by his ancient readers and are debated still; what is not in doubt is the shape, an eternal alternation with no first term and no last, in which unity and multiplicity each hold the field in turn and neither wins.

Concept map of Empedocles’ cosmic cycle, with the unifying Sphere and the alternating dominion of Love and Strife — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The two poems and the Strasbourg papyrus

The physics is one poem; the soul is the other — or so the older picture had it. Alongside On Nature, antiquity knew a poem of the Purifications, and the question of how the two stand to one another has reopened in living memory. In 1999 Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi published a papyrus that had lain unread in the university library at Strasbourg since the early twentieth century: some fifty-two scraps which they reassembled into eleven groupings, more than seventy new lines of the physical poem, the largest single addition to the text of any Presocratic in modern times. The Strasbourg find did more than lengthen On Nature. By overlapping at one point with material long assigned to the religious poem, it sharpened a debate that had been simmering for decades: whether Empedocles wrote two poems at all, or one great poem in which cosmology and the destiny of the soul were a single continuous teaching. The two-poem and one-poem readings each have their weight, and the question remains genuinely unsettled among those who edit the text. It matters because it decides whether the daimon’s fall belongs to a separate gospel or is the human meaning folded inside the physics itself.

The fallen daimon

For the Purifications tell a story that the physics, read alone, would not lead one to expect. There are daimones — long-lived divine spirits — who share in the life of the blessed; and one who sins, who stains his hands with bloodshed or swears a false oath, is cast out from among them and condemned to wander, for thrice ten thousand seasons, born and reborn through every kind of mortal shape. Such an exile, Empedocles says in the poem’s own voice, is what he is: a fugitive from the gods and a wanderer, who has put his trust in raving Strife. The fall is not a single death but a long sentence served across many lives — bush and bird and fish and man — until purity is regained and the spirit is gathered back to the company it left.

This is the doctrine of reincarnation, metempsychosis, the soul passing from body to body, which Empedocles holds in common with the Pythagorean school and the Orphic poems — the same complex from which it would descend to Plato. The kinship runs deep enough that ancient writers made Empedocles a pupil of Pythagoras or of his followers, though the link may be no more than a shared Sicilian and South-Italian inheritance. From the doctrine follow the abstentions that give the poem its name: the wanderer must keep his hands from the shedding of kindred blood, for the beast on the altar may be a father in another form, and the eating of flesh is a kind of cannibalism stretched across lives. The same logic reaches to the famous warning to keep one’s hands from beans, and to the leaves of the laurel — purity laid down as the architecture of a life turned toward release rather than as any recipe of ritual. The most arresting fragment is the self-presentation: walking among the people of Akragas, garlanded and thronged, Empedocles names himself an immortal god, no longer mortal, honored by all. Read beside the daimon’s exile, the claim is not megalomania but autobiography in the poem’s own terms — the voice of one near the end of the long return, the daimon remembering what it is.

How the divine self-claim of the Purifications sits with the cool physics of On Nature is the hinge of all interpretation. One tradition keeps them apart: the scientist and the prophet, the cosmologist of Strife and the preacher of purity, uneasy roommates in one body. Another, gathering force since the Strasbourg papyrus, reads them as one teaching — the daimon’s fall and return being the soul’s own passage through the very cycle of mixture and separation that the roots undergo, so that to know the physics is already to know one’s own exile and the road home. Peter Kingsley pressed the case further, setting Empedocles among the healer-magicians of the western Greek world and reading the underworld journey as something the philosopher claimed to make and to teach; the portrait is vivid and remains a minority current, contested by those who see in the fragments a cosmologist first. The figure holds both readings open because the man, by every sign, held them open himself.

Transmission and scholarship

Not a single poem of Empedocles survives whole. What there is — some hundred and fifty fragments and a thick surrounding cloud of testimony — comes to us embedded in the works of later writers who quoted him for their own ends, so that every line arrives wrapped in another’s argument. The single greatest preserver is the sixth-century commentator Simplicius, who in expounding Aristotle’s Physics copied out long stretches of the verse precisely because he meant to save the old philosophy from oblivion; for the Presocratics generally he alone preserves a large share of all the words that remain. Aristotle himself discusses and criticizes the four roots and the cosmic cycle across the Metaphysics, the Physics, and On Generation and Corruption; Theophrastus reports the theory of perception by effluences; Diogenes Laertius gathers the life and many fragments in the eighth book of his Lives; Sextus Empiricus and others quote at need. The heresy-hunter Hippolytus of Rome, cataloguing pagan errors in his Refutation of All Heresies, set down the four element-gods and the two powers of Love and Strife and so preserved his own share of the verse. The modern reconstruction rests on the numbering of Hermann Diels, refined with Walther Kranz in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, by whose “DK” figures every fragment is now cited; John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy remains the most usable older English presentation in the public domain, and the editions and interpretations of M. R. Wright, Brad Inwood, and Simon Trépanier anchor the present scholarly text, with the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy mapping the live disputes for the general reader.

The text is still growing. In 2026 the papyrologist Nathan Carlig identified a fragment held in the archives of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo — cataloged as P. Fouad inv. 218 — as some thirty previously unknown lines of On Nature, treating the effluences that stream from bodies and the mechanics of sense-perception and sight. Edited by Carlig with Martin and Primavesi as L’Empédocle du Caire, the new verses bear on his theory that perception works by particles flowing off objects to meet pores in the perceiver, and they appear to lie behind a passage in Plutarch and to touch the reports in Plato and Theophrastus — a reminder that the poem once ran to thousands of lines and that the spade and the archive have not yet finished with it.

Reception

Aristotle treated Empedocles as the first to set out a finite plurality of material elements and to add efficient causes that move them, and made him a fixed point in his own account of his predecessors, even while faulting the cycle for letting the world be governed now by Love and now by Strife with no further reason. Plato names the “Sicilian Muses” in the Sophist for the teaching that being is at once one and many, gathered and pulled apart, and the affinity of the Purifications with Plato’s own myths of the soul’s fall and recollection is plain enough that the later tradition read them together. Through the Middle Platonist and Neoplatonist centuries the daimon exiled from the blessed and laboring back toward its source became one of the images on which the Platonic doctrine of the soul’s descent and ascent was built, and Plutarch quotes him as a sage. The four roots, renamed the four elements and joined later to a fifth, would underwrite physics and medicine and alchemy for two thousand years, long after the verse that bore them had crumbled to fragments.

The Death of Empedocles, the later legend of his leap into Mount Etna, painted c. 1665-1670 — Salvator Rosa, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The roots do not perish, and neither does the contest that moves them. Love gathers what Strife has scattered and Strife scatters what Love has joined, on and on, with the Sphere at one limit and the sundered four at the other and the world of mortal things forever forming in the passage between; and somewhere in that passage a daimon, stained and exiled, walks its thirty thousand seasons of borrowed shapes toward the company it was thrown out of — the philosopher of Akragas among them, garlanded and almost home.

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