Empedocles (c.495–c.435 BC)

7. Sacrifice

Empedocles relates his guilt over bloodshed to ’trust in raving strife’ (fr. 115). As all creation of plants and animals is due to the power of Love, so Strife is the invariable cause of their dissolution and death. It is in his account of blood that Empedocles describes the mixture of the roots as ‘anchored in the perfect harbours of Kypris [Love]’ (fr. 98). Hence to kill by spilling blood is to act against the principle that makes for all that flourishes and enjoys harmony. It is no surprise that Empedocles conceives it as madness.

Theophrastus tells us that in his account of ‘sacrifices and theogony’, usually taken to belong to Purifications, Empedocles portrayed a golden age when humans recognized only Love as a god: ‘They did not count Ares a god nor Battle-cry, nor was Zeus their king nor Kronos nor Poseidon, but Kypris [that is, Aphrodite] was queen’ (fr. 128). There was no animal sacrifice:

Empedocles envisages this golden age as a time when humans were in fact friends with the rest of animal creation: ‘All things were tame and gentle to humans, both beasts and birds, and friendship burned bright’ (fr. 130). Is the image of harmony painted in these passages intended as part of the cosmic history? According to Empedocles’ theory of evolution Strife was more, not less, dominant in the past. We should infer that like most pictures of primal bliss, this too is designed to function principally as an ideal measure of contemporary misery and wickedness.

What Empedocles lays down for all time is a moral rule against killing living things, whose expression led Aristotle to treat it as a paradigm of how natural law is to be conceived: ‘That which is the law for all extends unendingly throughout wide-ruling air and the boundless sunlight’ (fr. 135). Particular Pythagorean injunctions against touching beans and laurel leaves are recorded as Empedoclean (frs 140–1). As for the future, other verses promise the repentant sinner eventual release from the burden of reincarnation entailed by committing bloodshed:

Empedocles no doubt found the killing of other humans as horrific as animal sacrifice – the lines in which he represents sacrifice as infanticide etc. trade on a particular form of revulsion on the part of the reader. But he directs his outrage at violence to life as such, and more specifically at the assumption that blood-shedding can form part of a proper form of worship. In other words, his protest aims both to broaden our moral horizons and to reform religion. It should be seen as a radical challenge to the entire cultural framework of the ancient Greek city-state.