EmpedoclesOn a bright Sicilian morning in the fifth century BCE, the city of Acragas rises from the sea in terraces of stone and dust. Temples crown the ridge above, their columns catching the sun. Below, olive groves and vineyards climb the slopes. In the streets, merchants call out prices, children weave through the crowds, and somewhere, perhaps in a house near the city wall or walking among companions on a country path, moves a man whose reputation will swell to legend: physician, prophet, poet, wonder-worker, and philosopher. His name is Empedocles, and he will try to do something audacious with his thought—to reconcile the severe logic of Parmenides with the obvious fact that the world seems full of many things that change.Empedocles was born in Acragas, on the southern coast of Sicily, around 495 BCE, a generation after Parmenides and roughly contemporary with Anaxagoras and the young Socrates. Acragas was one of the richest Greek cities of its time, famed for its splendid temples and for the extravagance of its citizens. Later writers say its people “built as if they were to live forever and feasted as if they were to die tomorrow.” It is into this world of luxury and civic ambition that Empedocles steps, but his own persona stands slightly askew to it all. He cultivates an image that is part holy man, part scientist, part politician. He wears purple robes and a golden wreath, goes barefoot like a mystic, and claims powers of healing and prophecy. Yet he also writes technical verses about nature, anatomy, and perception, and he plunges into political struggles, siding with the democratic faction against oligarchic rule.We do not have any prose work from him. What remains are fragments of two long poems, written in hexameter verse: one traditionally called “On Nature” and another called “Purifications.” In “On Nature,” he explains what the world is made of and how it changes. In “Purifications,” he presents a religious-moral vision of the soul’s fall and possible redemption. The two are not separate in his mind. For Empedocles, understanding the structure of the cosmos and understanding the soul’s condition are bound together. To know what we are made of is already to know something about how we should live.Selenius Media

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