Empedocles Recycled

Abstract

It is no longer generally believed that Empedocles was the divided character portrayed by nineteenth-century scholars, a man whose scientific and religious views were incompatible but untouched by each other. Yet it is still widely held that, however unitary his thought, nevertheless he still wrote more than one poem, and that his poems can be clearly divided between those which do, and those which do not, concern ‘religious matters’.1 Once this assumption can be shown to be shaky or actually false, the grounds for dividing the quotations of Empedocles into two poems by subject matter disappear; and without that division our interpretation of Empedocles stands in need of radical revision. This paper startswith the modest task of showing that Empedocles may have written only one philosophical poem and not two, and goes on to suggest some of the ways in which we have to rethink the whole story if he did. If all our material belongs to one poem we are bound to link the cycle of the daimones with that of the elements, and this has far-reaching consequences for our interpretation.

Empedocles the Wandering Daimōn and Trusting in Mad Strife

“…There is an oracle of necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, 1 Everlasting, sealed with broad oaths: Whenever one in his crimes stains his own limbs with blood4 … Committing misdeeds, swears falsely-The daimones who have obtained as their lot a long life-5 He is to wander for thrice ten thousand seasons away from the blessed ones, Growing to be5 all sorts of forms of mortal things through time, Interchanging the painful paths of life. For the force of air drives him into the sea, Osborne 1987b) to divorce Empedocles' natural philosophy from his religion and eschatology. In particular, ensemble d juxtaposes cosmological and daimonological themes.…”

A.6. The Presocratics in the doxographical tradition. Sources, controversies, and current research

“…Cf. O'Brien 1969: 150, who on the basis of the Suda suggests 2000 lines for the poem on physics-but it is a moot point whether there were two separate works (one work : Osborne 1987b). For Anaxagoras see further Perry 1983, Tarán 1987, and Sider 1981 leled for that period of Late Antiquity.…”

Love, Sex and the Gods: Why things have divine names in Empedocles’ poem, and why they come in pairs

“…28 The use of a neuter noun, and the avoidance of the personal pronoun in any gender, could support the idea that Strife's desired effect is not intelligent order, as we would expect of a rational purposive agent, but irrational disorder-that strife does not design a nicely ordered plural world, but rather just breaks up every kind of unity that there is and thereby renders things chaotic and disrupted. For this view, see further in my other treatments of Empedocles' cosmic cycle, such as Osborne (1987); Osborne (2005). 29 B17.21-24, quoted below.…”

“…My own view is that the daimones are fragments of the Sphairos which is broken into a plurality of pieces at the outbreak of strife. See Osborne (1987) and Osborne (2005).…”