Empedocles (c.495–c.435 BC)

1. Life and work

The first lines of Empedocles’ poem Purifications give a flavour of the man:

Men and women followed him in their thousands, Empedocles says, wanting prophecies or remedies for diseases. Not surprisingly there accumulated in antiquity a huge conglomeration of fact and fantasy about the life and death of such a figure, summarized by Diogenes Laertius (VIII 51–75). A cautious sifting yields the following picture.

Empedocles was born of aristocratic family, a little after Anaxagoras. He died aged sixty. He was active in the political life of Acragas as a fierce opponent of oligarchy and tyranny. He had a reputation as an orator: Aristotle even makes him the inventor of rhetoric. He is described as a physician, but despite his profound interest in human physiology, anecdotes of his miracle working and the supernatural powers he claimed his teaching would impart (fr. 111) both strongly suggest a practitioner of magic, an activity doubtless to be seen in the context of his Pythagorean religious beliefs.

Among various writings ascribed to him, the two most important were On Nature and Purifications, hexameter poems probably in three and two books respectively. On Nature was at the time of its composition very likely the longest work of philosophy ever written and Empedocles’ fragments constitute the largest corpus of original extracts to survive of any Presocratic. Scholars disagree about which of the fragments belong to which of the two major works – the sources seldom supply specific information on this point. In the age of Victorian rationalism it was supposed that On Nature presented a sober materialist philosophy of nature, subsequently abandoned in Purifications for the intoxications of mystery religion. Fragments were assigned to the two poems accordingly. The basis for this division of the material has long since collapsed, and more recent study (notably by Kahn1960) has suggested that On Nature itself draws religious morals from a philosophy which was always conceived in religious terms. Indeed, it has been argued that the great majority of the fragments, including those on religious themes, belong to On Nature, Purifications being simply a collection of oracles and ritual prescriptions designed to satisfy the desire for healing and salvation Empedocles mentions in its opening verses.