Empedoclēs

Empedoclēs (c.495–c.435 BC), Greek Presocratic philosopher of versatile genius, with the reputation of being a statesman, healer, philosopher, mystic, and wonder-worker. He was born of aristocratic family at Acragas in Sicily and after the fall of the tyranny c.468 BC was offered but declined the kingship, being an ardent democrat. Political upheavals led to his exile, and he travelled to south Italy and Greece. He was an accomplished orator, credited by Aristotle with the invention of rhetoric; Gorgias is said to have been his pupil. He also won fame as a scientist and healer; Galen called him the founder of the Sicilian school of medicine. However, it is as a thinker of far-reaching importance that he is chiefly known, and like Parmenides, by whom he was strongly influenced, he expressed his thought in hexameter verse, much read until late antiquity. Only some 450 lines survive, in quotation in other authors, but this is enough to give a fairly clear idea of Empedocles' meaning. According to Diogenes Laertius he composed two poems, On Nature, addressed to a friend, and Purifications (Katharmoi), addressed to the people of Acragas. In these Empedocles attempts to explain the world on scientific and rational grounds.

He accepts the thesis of the Eleatic School that ‘what exists’ cannot come into being nor pass away, but he denies that it is a unity and unchanging. There are four eternally persisting elements from which all other things are formed, earth, air, fire, and water, and the rearrangement of these elements gives rise to change; Empedocles uses as analogy the painter's depiction of a great variety of objects by mixing a limited number of pigments. He introduces two further principles, Love and Strife, also eternal, but having no perceptible qualities of their own and apprehended only by their effect on the other four. The universe is under their alternate domination: Love maintains a properly balanced mixture in things, but Strife dissolves this mixture into constituents that war against each other; the universe is recurringly brought together and then fragmented in a cosmic cycle. Strife, Empedocles believed, was increasing at the time in which he lived. Part of his work is devoted to cosmogony, the gradual development of the present world, the evolution of animals, and many topics in biology. He relies on metaphor and analogy for giving clarity to his explanations. In the fragments which have been attributed to Purifications Empedocles gives an account of the primal sin and collective fall of mankind (though not apparently precluding the particular fall of the individual soul) from a state of innocence when Love ruled the universe. The sin appears to be that of bloodshed and meat-eating. The fallen soul, an exiled god, daimōn, is punished by successive incarnations in animal (and even vegetable) forms; it feels a homeless exile until it regains its original purity and rises up the scale of lives to the highest rung, ‘prophets, bards, doctors, and princes’—Empedocles himself has been thought to be all these—and thence escapes back to its original incorporeal state of divinity. In some surviving lines Empedocles declares that he has attained this state and is no longer a mortal but an immortal god. Much of this is clearly close to Pythagorean teaching (see PYTHAGORAS) and the Orphic poems (see ORPHEUS).

The Roman poet Lucretius was inspired by Empedocles to compose his own scientific poem, De rerum natura, in which he praises his predecessor for ‘the songs of his godlike heart’. Empedocles' death is variously recounted, most notably in the story that he committed suicide by throwing himself into the crater of Mount Etna.