Empedocles

Empedocles was born around 490 BCE in Akragas, the Greek city on Sicily's southern coast known today as Agrigento ^[1]. Akragas at that time ranked among the richest settlements in the Greek world. Its temples, some of which still stand, advertised the wealth its citizens drew from grain, olives, and trade, and the poet Pindar praised the city in his victory odes. Empedocles grew up inside its governing elite. His grandfather, also named Empedocles, was remembered for winning the horse race at the Olympic Games of 496 BCE, and his father Meton took part in civic affairs, reportedly helping to remove a tyrant from power ^[2].

Almost nothing certain survives about his education. Later biographers, above all Diogenes Laertius, who compiled a life of Empedocles in the third century CE, filled the gap with stories linking him to Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras as teachers ^[2]. Modern scholars treat these claims cautiously. What his surviving verses do show is deep familiarity with the poetry of Homer and Hesiod and with the philosophical arguments of Parmenides of Elea, whose insistence that nothing can come from nothing set the problem Empedocles spent his career trying to solve ^[3].

Sicily in his youth was politically turbulent. Akragas passed from the rule of the tyrant Theron, who defeated Carthage at Himera in 480 BCE, through the short and violent reign of his son Thrasydaeus, and then into a period of civic self government. For anyone asking who was Empedocles, this backdrop matters: he came of age in a city experimenting with democracy, and the ancient sources agree that he threw himself into that experiment ^[1].

Ancient tradition presents Empedocles first as a public figure. Diogenes Laertius, drawing on earlier writers such as Timaeus of Tauromenium, records that after the fall of the tyrants Empedocles supported the popular party in Akragas, broke up an aristocratic club that threatened the new order, and even declined an offer of kingship over the city ^[2]. Whether every detail is true, the picture is consistent: a wealthy aristocrat who chose the democratic side. One anecdote has him prosecuting two officials whose arrogance at a banquet seemed to him a rehearsal for tyranny.

His fame soon spread beyond politics. Empedocles practiced medicine and presented himself as a healer of unusual power. In one surviving fragment of his own poetry he describes crowds following him through the towns, some seeking prophecies, others begging to hear a healing word for their diseases ^[3]. Stories accumulated around this persona. He was said to have revived a woman named Panthea who had lain breathless for many days, to have cleared a plague from the city of Selinus by diverting rivers into its stagnant marsh, and to have blocked a health destroying wind at Akragas by hanging skins across a mountain gorge, a feat that earned him the nickname wind stopper ^[2].

The manner matched the message. Ancient writers describe him wearing a purple robe, a golden girdle, bronze sandals, and a laurel wreath, moving through Sicily with a grave expression and a train of attendants ^[2]. Some later readers dismissed this as showmanship. Others see in it the surviving trace of an older role, the poet as seer and purifier, which Empedocles combined with the new rational inquiry of the Greek natural philosophers. That combination of scientist and prophet is one of the most distinctive Empedocles facts, and it explains why the ancient world found him so hard to classify ^[4].

The core of Empedocles achievements lies in his physical theory. Parmenides had argued that true being cannot be created or destroyed, a conclusion that seemed to make change impossible. Empedocles answered by proposing four eternal and unchanging roots of all things: earth, air, fire, and water ^[3]. Nothing truly comes into being or perishes, he argued. What people call birth and death is only the mixture and separation of these roots in different ratios. Bone, blood, flesh, and every other substance is a particular blend, and he even offered recipes, describing bone as a compound of specific parts of fire, water, and earth ^[4].

To explain why the roots combine and part, he introduced two cosmic powers, Love (Philotes) and Strife (Neikos). Love draws unlike elements together into unified wholes; Strife pulls them apart into separate masses. The cosmos cycles endlessly between a state of total unity under Love, which he pictured as a perfect sphere, and complete separation under Strife, with the world of living things arising in the intermediate phases ^[3]. Aristotle later credited Empedocles as the first to treat these moving causes as a pair of opposites, and the four element scheme itself, adopted by Aristotle and transmitted through Galen's medicine, remained the standard framework of European natural science until the seventeenth century ^[5].

His biology was equally bold. In the phase when Love was gaining ground, he claimed, separate limbs and organs wandered the earth and joined at random, producing monsters such as ox creatures with human faces; only the combinations capable of surviving and reproducing persisted ^[4]. Aristotle criticized the idea, yet many modern historians of science note its loose family resemblance to natural selection, and Charles Darwin himself mentioned Aristotle's report of the passage in a historical sketch attached to later editions of On the Origin of Species ^[6]. Empedocles also offered a famous experimental analogy: he compared breathing to the behavior of water in a clepsydra, a household water lifter, showing that air is a real body that can hold water out of a submerged vessel ^[4]. He held that light takes time to travel, that the moon shines by reflected light, and he proposed an early theory of vision in which the eye works like a lantern ^[5].

All of this he set out in hexameter verse. Ancient sources assign him two poems, commonly called On Nature and Purifications, running to several thousand lines, of which a few hundred survive in quotations, along with papyrus fragments published from a scroll in Strasbourg in 1999 that added new lines and complicated the old division between the two works ^[7]. Aristotle reportedly called him the inventor of rhetoric, and the Roman poet Lucretius, though rejecting his physics, praised the splendor of his verse ^[2].

Alongside his physics, Empedocles taught a doctrine of the soul with strong Pythagorean coloring. In the verses assigned to the Purifications he describes himself as a daimon, a long lived spirit exiled from the company of the blessed for an ancient offense connected with bloodshed, condemned to wander for thirty thousand seasons through successive bodies ^[3]. He claims to remember earlier lives, writing that he had already been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, and a silent fish in the sea. On this basis he preached against animal sacrifice and the eating of flesh, warning that a man slaughtering a beast might be killing a transformed kinsman ^[4].

The climax of this teaching was startling even to the ancients. Addressing the citizens of Akragas, he announced that he went among them no longer as a mortal but as a god, honored by all, crowned with ribbons and garlands ^[3]. Scholars still debate how literally he meant it, and how the exiled daimon of the religious poem relates to the mixtures of elements in his physics; some read the two poems as one continuous system, others as separate registers for separate audiences ^[7].

Of his private circumstances little is secure. He inherited substantial wealth and was said to have used it generously, providing dowries for the daughters of poorer citizens ^[2]. Ancient writers name Pausanias, a physician to whom On Nature is addressed, as his close companion and pupil. The rhetorician Gorgias of Leontini was also described in antiquity as his student. Reports about a wife or children are absent or contradictory, and Diogenes Laertius admits that even the basic facts of his life were disputed within a few generations of his death ^[2].

The end of Empedocles' life is wrapped in competing stories, and the ancients already knew it. Diogenes Laertius, our main source, lists several versions side by side ^[2]. Timaeus, the Sicilian historian, wrote that Empedocles left Sicily for the Peloponnese, perhaps as a political exile after his enemies regained influence in Akragas, and never returned; on this sober account he died somewhere in mainland Greece around 430 BCE, aged about sixty ^[1].

The version that captured the imagination of posterity is different. According to a tale reported by Heraclides of Pontus and repeated with variations by later writers, Empedocles, after healing the breathless Panthea and holding a sacrificial feast near Mount Etna, slipped away in the night and threw himself into the volcano's crater, wishing to vanish without a trace and so confirm the belief that he had become a god ^[2]. The mountain betrayed him, the story goes, by casting up one of his bronze sandals. Even in antiquity skeptics scoffed; Timaeus attacked the tale as a fabrication, pointing out that Empedocles was in the Peloponnese at the time ^[2].

True or not, the leap into Mount Etna became inseparable from his name. Horace mentions it in his Art of Poetry as an example of a poet's right to destroy himself, Matthew Arnold built his 1852 dramatic poem Empedocles on Etna around the philosopher's final night, and Friedrich Hölderlin left an unfinished tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, on the same theme ^[6]. Few deaths in ancient philosophy, save that of Socrates, have generated so much literature.

Empedocles' four element theory proved to be one of the most durable ideas in the history of science. Plato used it, Aristotle systematized it, adding the pairs of qualities hot, cold, wet, and dry, and the physician Galen wove it into the theory of the four humors that governed European and Islamic medicine into the early modern period ^[5]. When seventeenth century chemists such as Robert Boyle attacked the doctrine of the four elements, they were still arguing with a framework that had begun in Akragas two millennia earlier. Any balanced Empedocles biography has to reckon with that extraordinary afterlife.

His influence ran through poetry and philosophy as well. Lucretius took him as the model for philosophical epic in Latin. Aristotle discussed him constantly, preserving many fragments in the process, and the physicians of the Sicilian medical tradition looked back to him as a founder ^[4]. In the twentieth century the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche sketched plans for a drama about him, Bertrand Russell devoted a lively chapter to him in A History of Western Philosophy, and the Strasbourg papyrus discovery of the 1990s made him the rare Presocratic whose textual corpus actually grew in modern times ^[7].

For historians of biology he remains a suggestive forerunner. His picture of random combinations filtered by survival was not a theory of evolution, since his creatures arose from wandering limbs rather than descent with modification, yet it planted the thought that apparent design in living things might emerge without a designing mind ^[6]. That idea, together with the four roots, the cosmic contest of Love and Strife, the purple robe, and the bronze sandal on the rim of Etna, keeps Empedocles among the most vivid figures of early Greek thought: a thinker the classicist W. K. C. Guthrie described as combining in one person the scientist, the poet, and the prophet ^[4].