The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation

Alan D. Booth is an associate professor of Classics at Brock University
in St. Catharines.

Empedocles, a Sicilian Greek who flourished in the mid-fifth-century
B.C., exposed his views on the cosmos and man’s role therein in
hexameter verse, of which only fragments remain. It had long been
thought that Empedocles wrote two poems, which we identify by the titles
“On Nature” and “Purifications”: the former would have revealed
his scientific thought, the latter his religious thought—hence a ready
explanation for some apparent conflict in his pronouncements. Yet
Empedocles and others of his time would not have distinguished sharply
between religion, philosophy, and natural science. Nor is the evidence
for two separate poems unimpeachable. So Inwood argues that Empedocles
expounded his philosophy in a single poem, the “Purifications,”
which included the material traditionally assigned to “On Nature.”

Some 50 pages of the introduction (Part 1) are devoted to showing how
the ideas signaled in the fragments may fit into a coherent system based
on the belief that the cosmos is constituted, in recurrent cycles of
existence, from six entities—air, earth, water, fire, love, and
strife. Empedocles would allow humans, as blends of these entities, a
series of incarnations within a given cosmic cycle: by various
purifications, the individual may improve the quality of his subsequent
incarnation; but there is no individual immortality, for the human is
dissolved into the basic entities at the end of the cycle.

Part 2 furnishes a translation of the fragments and their respective
contexts. The various ancient authors who cite Empedocles had potential
access to the whole of his work, and so their interpretations, explicit
or implied, may offer valuable pointers. Part 3 translates ancient
testimonies about Empedocles’ life and work. Part 4 gives the Greek
text and an English translation of the fragments, arranged in the
sequence in which they would have occurred in Empedocles’ one poem.
The translation is deliberately literal so as not to conceal problems of
interpretation.

In sum, Inwood has produced a book admirable both for its organization
and its balanced and incisive judgments.