Empedocles (c.495–c.435 BC)

2. Pythagoreanism

Empedocles praises Pythagoras as a man of surpassing knowledge and ‘wise works’, with powers of foresight extending to ten or twenty generations ahead (fr. 129). What prompted this extravagant admiration was evidently Pythagoras’ analysis of the human condition: to atone for sin the soul is subject to a cycle of reincarnations into a variety of living forms (since all life is akin) until release is eventually achieved (see Pythagoras §2). On this view animal sacrifice counts as unwitting slaughter of one’s kin. Empedocles dramatizes the implication in some gothic hexameters:

Further verses spell out the penalty bloodshed incurs, invoking an ‘oracle of Necessity’ which condemns guilty spirits (daimones) to wander apart from the blessed for 30,000 years, in all manner of mortal forms. They conclude with a dramatic confession: ‘Of these I too am now one, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, having put my trust in raving Strife’ (fr. 115).

Fragment 115 is said by Plutarch to have formed part of the preface to Empedocles’ philosophy. Is this a reference to Purifications (the usual supposition)? ‘Philosophy’ rather suggests On Nature; and Empedocles announces the recovery of his divinity at the start of Purifications (see §1). On the basis of comparison with the proem to Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things Sedley (1989) argues persuasively that the entire sequence of fragments just summarized helped to launch On Nature. Whether this is right or not, Empedocles’ Pythagoreanism is the best clue we have to his intentions in On Nature. The poem should be seen as an attempt to exhibit the cycle of incarnation as an instance of a general pattern of repetition governing all change: plurality is converted into unity by the power of Love and unity is then broken into plurality by Strife, until the process is reversed and conversion of plurality into unity begins once again. What On Nature works out in detail is the realization of this pattern in the rhythms of plant and animal life and the design and dissolution of the body, but above all in the history of the universe itself (see Pythagoreanism §3).