Greek Texts & Translations

Moreover, from his abundant means he bestowed dowries upon many of the maidens of the city who had no dowry. No doubt it was the same means that enabled him to don a purple robe and over it a golden girdle, as Favorinus relates in his Memorabilia, and again slippers of bronze and a Delphic laurel-wreath. He had thick hair, and a train of boy attendants. He himself was always grave, and kept this gravity of demeanour unshaken. In such sort would he appear in public ; when the citizens met him, they recognized in this demeanour the stamp, as it were, of royalty. But afterwards, as he was going in a carriage to Messene to attend some festival, he fell and broke his thigh ; this brought an illness which caused his death at the age of seventy-seven. Moreover, his tomb is in Megara.

As to his age, Aristotle's account is different, for he makes him to have been sixty when he died ; while others make him one hundred and nine. He flourished in the 84th Olympiad. ^note Demetrius of Troezen in his pamphlet Against the Sophists said of him, adapting the words of Homer ^note :

He tied a noose that hung aloft from a tall cornel-tree and thrust his neck into it, and his soul went down to Hades.

In the short letter of Telauges which was mentioned above ^note it is stated that by reason of his age he slipped into the sea and was drowned. Thus and thus much of his death.

There is an epigram of my own on him in my Pammetros in a satirical vein, as follows ^note :

Thou, Empedocles, didst cleanse thy body with nimble flame, fire didst thou drink from everlasting bowls. ^note I will not say that of thine own will thou didst hurl thyself into the stream of Etna ; thou didst fall in against thy will when thou wouldst fain not have been found out.

And another ^note :

Verily there is a tale about the death of Empedocles, how that once he fell from a carriage and broke his right thigh. But if he leapt into the bowls of fire and so took a draught of life, how was it that his tomb was shown still in Megara ?

His doctrines were as follows, that there are four elements, fire, water, earth and air, besides friendship by which these are united, and strife by which they are separated. These are his words ^note : Shining Zeus and life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis, who lets flow from her tears the source of mortal life,

where by Zeus he means fire, by Hera earth, by Aidoneus air, and by Nestis water.

"And their continuous change," he says, "never ceases," ^note as if this ordering of things were eternal. At all events he goes on ^note :

At one time all things uniting in one through Love, at another each carried in a different direction through the hatred born of strife.

The sun he calls a vast collection of fire and larger than the moon ; the moon, he says, is of the shape of a quoit, and the heaven itself crystalline. The soul, again, assumes all the various forms of animals and plants. At any rate he says ^note :

Before now I was born a boy and a maid, a bush and a bird, and a dumb fish leaping out of the sea.

His poems On Nature and Purifications run to 5000 lines, his Discourse on Medicine to 600. Of the tragedies we have spoken above.