Fragments
What survives of Empedocles
Empedocles wrote one book and it is lost. These 8 lines reached us only because other writers copied them into works of their own, usually while arguing about something else.
A twofold tale I shall tell: at one time it grew to be one alone out of many, at another it grew apart to be many out of one. Double is the birth of mortal things and double their failing.
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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.
Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, who with her tears makes mortal springs flow.
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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.
There is no birth of any mortal thing, nor any end in accursed death; there is only mixing, and the separating of what has been mixed, and men call this birth.
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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.
By earth we see earth, by water water, by air bright air, and by fire destructive fire; by love we see love, and strife by baneful strife.
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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.
Friends, who dwell in the great town on the yellow rock of Acragas, I go about among you an immortal god, mortal no more, honoured by all as is fitting.
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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.
There is an oracle of Necessity, ancient decree of the gods and sealed with broad oaths: when one defiles his own limbs with bloodshed, he must wander thrice ten thousand seasons away from the blessed.
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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.
For I have already been at some time a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, and a mute fish in the sea.
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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.
There was among them a man of surpassing knowledge, who had acquired the utmost wealth of understanding; for whenever he reached out with all his mind, easily he saw each of all the things that are, in ten and even twenty lifetimes of men.
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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.