Empedocles

Alas, wretched race of mortals, deeply ill-fated:

I wept and wailed when I beheld the unfamiliar place.

" Empedocles too plainly agrees with him when he says:

Since the philosophers themselves agree that the universe is composed of contraries, according to the friendship and enmity of Empedocles.

these draw its origin from one quarter, those draw its departure off to another — according as either the prestige of Plato, or the vigour of Zeno, or the steadiness of Aristotle, or the stupor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles has persuaded them.

And I do not mean only those who fashion it out of manifest bodily things — as Hipparchus and Heraclitus out of fire, as Hippo and Thales out of water, as Empedocles and Critias out of blood, as Epicurus out of atoms (if atoms too compose corporealities by their conjunction), as Critolaus and his Peripatetics out of some fifth substance I know not what (if that too is a body, since it includes bod …

And yet those natural philosophers, very rarely, when they are stuck at some point, cry out, as if driven by inspiration — Empedocles indeed so that he sometimes seems to me to rave — that all things are hidden, that we perceive nothing, discern nothing, can find out at all nothing of what kind a thing is;

'Empedocles seems to you to rave:

Empedocles those four well-known and familiar elements.

Persons in the states mentioned repeat propositions of geometry and verses of Empedocles;

But inasmuch as the last premise, which originates action, is an opinion as to some object of sense, and it is this opinion which the unrestrained man when under the influence of passion either does not possess, or only possesses in a way which as we saw does not amount to knowing it but only makes him repeat it as the drunken man repeats the maxims of Empedocles, and since the ultimate term is no …

Others maintain the opposite view, notably Empedocles, who declares that Like seeks after like.

whereas your own poet, Empedocles of Acragas, hints at your case:

As for Empedocles of Acragas, he fell into a plurality, and in addition to these four elements reckons up Strife and Love.

"It was with Zeno, as we have received it, that Arcesilas set up his whole contest—not from obstinacy or zeal for victory, as it seems to me at least, but because of the obscurity of those matters which had brought Socrates, and, even before Socrates, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and almost all the ancients, to the confession of ignorance.

And to me, indeed, it seems that, since there had been two opinions among the philosophers of old—one of those who held that all things come to pass by fate in such a way that this fate brings the force of necessity (in which opinion were Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Aristotle), the other of those to whom it seemed that the voluntary motions of the mind are without any fate—Chrysippus, …

For not mean men, but the greatest and most learned, Pythagoras and Empedocles, proclaim that there is one condition of right for all living things, and cry that inexpiable penalties hang over those by whom an animal has been wronged.

though it is plain that they both come into being and perish and are without all sensation.

" Empedocles holds the soul to be the blood suffused about the heart;

Some one of these, then, the soul is, lest so vigorous a mind should lie sunk either in the heart or the brain, or in the Empedoclean blood.

Since you appear to be in other respects an admirer of Socrates and to be struck with wonder at the man in your discourses, can you tell me whose disciple among the wise he was — as Pheidias the maker of statues was of Hegias, and Polygnotus the painter and his brother both of their father Aglaophon, and Pherecydes is said to have become the teacher of Pythagoras, and Pythagoras of Empedocles and …

Empedocles that it is made up of four, with strife and love operating among them;

Than this true man.

As first Empedocles of Acragas,

The lofty music of his breast divine

if, I say, you separate from this ruling faculty the things attached to it through the passions, and the things of time beyond or behind it, and make yourself such as Empedocles' "sphere, rounded, rejoicing in its circling rest," and practise to live only that which you live, that is, the present — then you will be able to pass the remainder of your time until death untroubled, kindly, and at peac …

And on this subject all the philosophers, except Parmenides, may be marshalled in one line—Protagoras and Heracleitus and Empedocles—and the chief poets in the two kinds of poetry, Epicharmus, in comedy, and in tragedy, Homer, who, in the line 0ceanus the origin of the gods, and Tethys their mother, has said that all things are the offspring of flow and motion;

likewise Empedocles, who leapt down into the fires of Mount Etna;

Empedocles gave his whole self to the fires of Aetna at Catana:

Yet it is enough that the philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles and the Platonists, no smaller, cries out to the contrary that the soul is immortal — indeed they go further and most nearly affirm that it may return into bodies, though not into the same ones, though not into human bodies only, so that Euphorbus is reckoned to pass into Pythagoras, and Homer into a peacock.

But if even then, in those places, Diogenes from his tub had barked, not with mud-fouled feet, as the couches of Plato know, but he would have carried the whole Empedocles, mud and all, into the shrines of Cloacina — Empedocles, who in his madness had declared himself a heaven-dweller, that as a god he might first salute his sisters, then men.