Empedocles

c. 495 - c. 435 BCE · Greek (Sicilian, of Acragas) · Presocratic natural philosophy, cosmology, eschatology, didactic epic poetry

There is no birth of any of all mortal things, nor any end in baneful death; only mixing and separation of what was mixed.

Born in Acragas on the coast of Sicily, Empedocles refused the kingship of his city on democratic grounds — then, in the legend that clung to him for centuries, leaped into Mount Etna to vanish as a god. In Homeric hexameters he composed a didactic epic fusing natural science, cosmology, and eschatology into one teaching.

Topics Empedocles addresses

• the four roots (rhizomata)
• Love and Strife (Philotes and Neikos)
• the cosmic cycle
• the Sphairos
• mixing and separation
• the transmigrating daimon
• the long exile through mortal forms
• I am a deathless god (B 112)
• the fall from divinity (B 115)
• the single poem hypothesis
• the prohibition of bloodshed
• vegetarianism and bloodless sacrifice
• pores and effluences
• the Parmenidean inheritance
• response to Parmenides
• the rescue of plurality
• zoogony and the history of life
• embryology and generation
• the proem to Pausanias
• divine and mortal knowledge
• phronesis in the elements
• the Strasbourg papyrus
• rational theology
• Pythagorean influence

Converse with Empedocles on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Empedocles's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.