A Philosopher Who Claimed to Be a God

The other body of fragments has a different voice entirely. It addresses the people of Akragas, declares that he goes among them as an immortal god and no longer a mortal, honoured as he walks with ribbons and garlands, and describes a law of necessity under which a spirit that has stained its hands with bloodshed or sworn falsely must wander for thirty thousand seasons, born in every kind of mortal form, exiled from the blessed. He says he has been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird and a fish in the sea. From that follow the prohibitions: abstain from flesh, because the animal you kill may be a relative in another shape, and keep away from beans and from laurel leaves.

For a long time these were assigned to a separate poem and treated as a private religion in tension with his physics. The recovery of a papyrus in Strasbourg, published in the 1990s, supplied text that overlaps the known fragments and suggests the two bodies of material are more closely joined than that division allows. The question is genuinely open. The story that he leapt into the crater of Etna so that his disappearance would be taken for an ascent, leaving one bronze sandal behind, comes from much later and hostile writers and should be read as satire rather than as biography.