Fragments

What survives of Empedocles

Nothing Empedocles wrote survives complete. These 8 lines reached us only because later writers copied them into works of their own, usually while arguing about something else.

DK 31 B17, Wording likely his
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 158.1 (c. 540 CE)
The same commentator who rescued Parmenides copied out some thirty-five lines here, again while explaining Aristotle to students who no longer had the originals.
The core of the cosmology: Love draws the elements together, Strife drives them apart, and the cycle has no end.
DK 31 B6, Wording likely his
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists X.315 (c. 200 CE)
Cited in a catalogue of what earlier thinkers had said the world is made of, as a step in arguing that none of them could be shown to be right.
The four elements, named as gods rather than substances. Which god stands for which element was already being argued about in antiquity.
DK 31 B8, Wording likely his
Plutarch, Against Colotes 1111f (c. 100 CE)
Plutarch was defending the old philosophers against an Epicurean who claimed they had made life impossible to live. He quoted this to show the doctrine was subtler than the caricature.
DK 31 B109, Wording likely his
Aristotle, Metaphysics; On the Soul 1000b6; 404b13 (c. 340 BCE)
Quoted twice, as the clearest statement of the principle that like is known by like, which Aristotle then set about dismantling.
DK 31 B112, Wording likely his
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VIII.62 (c. 230 CE)
A biographer collecting the stories that made his subject famous, including the claim to divinity that later got him mocked.
Addressed to his own city. The line that made Empedocles a legend and, to hostile readers, a charlatan.
DK 31 B115, Wording likely his
Hippolytus of Rome, and separately Plutarch, Refutation of All Heresies; On Exile VII.29; 607c (c. 222 and c. 100 CE)
Hippolytus used it to argue that a heresy about the soul's fall was borrowed from a pagan poet. Plutarch had quoted the same lines a century earlier to console a friend who had been banished.
The same passage doing opposite work: evidence in a heresy trial, and comfort for an exile.
DK 31 B117, Wording likely his
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VIII.77 (c. 230 CE)
Included in the biography as evidence that Empedocles taught the transmigration of souls.
DK 31 B129, Wording likely his
Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 30 (c. 280 CE)
Quoted by a biographer of Pythagoras who took the unnamed man of the poem to be Pythagoras himself, and used the lines as testimony from a near contemporary.
The poem never names him. Whether it is Pythagoras is an inference Porphyry made, and everyone since has inherited.