Historical Figure

Empedocles

Also Known As Empedocles of Acragas · Empedocles of Akragas

Philosophers

A philosopher of Akragas in Sicily who taught that everything is made from four roots, fire, air, earth and water, drawn together by Love and driven apart by Strife. He wrote in verse, and the surviving fragments belong to two works, one on nature and one usually called the Purifications, in which he addresses his townspeople as a spirit fallen from the company of the gods and exiled into flesh. That combination of physics with transmigration is why he stands in the ancestry of natural philosophy and of Western esotericism at once. The story that he leapt into Etna to prove his divinity is late and hostile.

Facts

Disputed

Lifespan or Floruit

494 BCE to 434 BCE 1

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

How Its Legacy Is Contested

Ancient tradition has Empedocles, who lived from about 494 to about 434 BC, leap into the crater of Etna. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition, Hornblower, Spawforth and Eidinow, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012) treats the story as late testimony, evidence of his posthumous reputation rather than of how he actually died. 3

Attestation

Historicity

Historically attested 1

Identity

Gender

Male 1

Publications

Notable Publication

On Nature, on the four roots and the powers of Love and Strife that mix them 1

Notable Publication

Purifications, on the fallen spirit and its return 1

Life

Lifespan or Floruit

About 494 BC to about 434 BC 1

Manner of Death

Died by suicide 2

Origins

Place of Origin

Acragas in Sicily 1

Classification

Nationality

Ancient Greece (Historical) 1

Veneration Status

Historically Significant but Not Venerated 2

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Four Roots and Two Forces

Empedocles answered the Parmenidean difficulty, that what is cannot come from what is not, by denying that anything comes to be at all. There are four roots, fire, air, earth and water, which are ungenerated and indestructible, and there are two forces, Love which draws them together and Strife which drives them apart. What people call birth and death is only mixing and separating, and the appearance of new things is the appearance of new proportions. Bone is so much fire to so much earth and water, in a stated ratio; the arrangement is quantitative and he gives numbers.

The cosmos runs on a cycle between the two forces. At the extreme of Love everything is blended into a motionless sphere in which no individual thing exists; Strife enters and separates, and in one of the stages of that separation limbs and organs wander alone and join at random, so that ox headed men and creatures with faces on both sides appear, and only the combinations that can survive and reproduce persist. Some readers have called that an anticipation of natural selection and others have thought the resemblance superficial. The four roots themselves had the longer career: they pass through Aristotle into medieval medicine, alchemy, and eventually into the elemental scheme that modern occult and divinatory systems still use.

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.

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