[In the following excerpt, Lombardo provides an overview of Empedocles's subject matter in his poetry.]

Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except for their meter. If the one is to be called a poet, the other should be called a natural philosopher rather than a poet.

(Aristotle, Poetics 1447)

Aristotle is quibbling, dissembling, or both. In a less celebrated passage (On Poets, fr. 70) he gives credit to Empedocles' sense of metaphor, powerful phrasing, and poetic technique in general. In any case, philosophical poetry was, then as now, a major form; and Empedocles' texts would be recognized as poetry—by the sheer energy of his language if nothing else—whether they were in meter or not. That they have not been so recognized by our literary generation is simply a matter of where and how translators have been directing their energies.

Recognition in antiquity was immediate and lasting, both for the man and his poetry. Empedocles (c. 490-c. 430 b.c.) was a Western Greek from the old and culturally rich soil of Sicily. Politically active (to the point of exile) in his native city Akragas, he was in touch with the philosophical and religious movements percolating through the larger Greek world and in particular those that emanated from southern Italy, home to Pythagoras and Parmenides and a center of mystic religious activity. He lived during the Golden Age of Pericles, but spiritually he belonged to an earlier generation; and although he never visited Athens, his reputation as a philosopher-shaman was pan-Hellenic.

It was a reputation founded at least partly on his poetry. His Purifications, a poem which would be a classic of personal religious literature if we had more if it, awed the crowds at Olympia when it was recited at the festival there by a professional rhapsode. The performance was enhanced by a personal appearance by the master himself, conspicuous even at the Olympics in bronze sandals, purple cloak and flowering wreath, his customary public apparel. But his appeal was more than popular, and it extended beyond his own lifetime. The Alexandrian critic Dionysius Thrax, who wrote what were to become standard handbooks of rhetoric, ranked Empedocles with Pindar and Aeschylus for the “austere and difficult harmony” of his poetic style. And the passionate but no-nonsense Roman poet Lucretius eulogized Empedocles as a culture hero and imitated his style in his own philosophical epic. Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot are among his more recent admirers. Whatever truth there is in the stories about his death—that he leaped into Aetna to prove his immortality or was assumed into heaven by a glittering light above it—he is due a modest rebirth in our time.

We possess some 450 lines of Empedocles' poetry—more text than for any other pre-Socratic philosopher. This material has come down to us in the mode of transmission usual for the pre-Socratics—chance quotation in later authors—as 153 fragments of two long hexameter poems, originally about 3000 lines long each, with the titles On Nature and Purifications. Assignation of the fragments to one poem or the other is frequently more a matter of judgment than record. As with Parmenides' fragments I have followed Diels' edition, because it is sensible and standard and because there is little to be gained by rearrangement. Empedocles' 150-odd fragments cannot be made to cohere with the rare formal elegance we find in Parmenides' nineteen pieces. But even among the most scattered ruins the mind of the artificer often still lingers.

Empedocles was in his prime (c. 450 b.c.) about twenty-five years after Parmenides, whose work he knew first-hand, and about fifty years after Heraclitus, whose writings he could not have seen but with whose ideas he seems somehow to have been familiar. Parmenides and Heraclitus had defined the polar limits of metaphysics, Parmenides insisting on the primacy of Being and dismissing all becoming and change as illusion, Heraclitus disavowing any kind of permanence except for that of perpetual flux. Empedocles had it both ways. His perception was that becoming without Being is meaningless, and that Being without becoming is a cosmic bore. To accommodate both he devised a cyclical physics: four immutable elements (Earth, Air, Water, Fire) operated upon by two opposing forces (Love and Strife) combine and disperse to produce, in alternating phases, the harmonious One and the divergent Many. Empedocles owed his vision of the One to Parmenides, and it is a strong, central vision:

… in the densely-patterned
abyss of space, there
at the point of fixity
in the stillness only
a Sphere, a globe
quietly rejoicing in its solitude.

But he himself was much more the poet of the Many in all its manifestations and transmogrifications. On Nature proliferated with the details of the physical universe, from the primordial explosion of the One down to the evolution of the minutest processes of biological organisms. We have enough remnants of this material to be able to appreciate Empedocles' pioneering efforts as a cosmologist, physicist, naturalist, and physiologist. But there is more to appreciate here than embryonic science. Empedocles was a practitioner, not merely a theoretician; and On Nature is not just a didactic poem, but an act of transmission.

The transmission was to Pausanias, the poem's addressee and Empedocles' only student (although he had followers and admirers to spare). Pausanias is later heard of as a physician who treated victims of the great plague in Athens (429-428 b.c.), and medicine was part of the practice transmitted by Empedocles, but not the whole of it. The poem's closing fragments (110, 111) suggest larger powers, including control over the weather and over death itself—but we are still dealing with the repertory rather than the art itself, into which the trainee is initiated near the beginning of the poem:

And now: Start using every faculty
                                                            to see how each thing is clear.

(fr. 4)

This is not merely a recommendation for scientific observation with an eye to formulating theories. Empedocles is not overly concerned with the accuracy of his theories (see fragments 21 and 71). What he wants first, and what his poetic practice consistently demonstrates, is clear perception of the entities that present themselves to our senses and our minds. The knowledge we so receive is admittedly meager in comparison with the Whole (fragment 2), as is the knowledge obtained from formal teaching of any kind, including Empedocles' own (end of fragment 2). This does not matter. It is the sequel, what one does with what one has received, that is important. First,

shelter it in a silent heart …

(fr. 3)

then,

… sift these words through the guts of your being.

(fr. 5)

And, finally, when the instruction is complete:

Press these things into
                                                                                the pit of your stomach
as you meditate with pure
                                                                                and compassionate mind
and they will be with you the rest of your life
and from them much more, for they grow of
themselves into the essence,
          into the core of each person's being …

(fr. 110)

It is the internalization, or digestion, of the poem's myriad data—of the Many, in fact—that the trainee must accomplish in order to acquire the shamanic powers promised by the master. It is a meditative process that requires purity and compassion, and it is the basis not only for the acquisition but the retention and deepening of the powers. Here is the heart of Empedocles' teaching and practice in On Nature. We see the process reflected in the poem's metaphysics—the Many return to the One when Love, centered in the Whorl, becomes the operant force in the universe—and embodied in the poem itself, which even in its fragmented form is largely a sustained meditation on the Becoming of all things.

On Nature is Empedocles' legacy of his knowledge and art. Purifications is his last testament. At some point in his life Empedocles immersed himself in Pythagoreanism, responding not to its mathematical mysticism but to its doctrine of reincarnation and the ethics attendant upon that doctrine. Although Pythagoreanism may not be enough to account for all that is in it, Purifications is a thoroughly Pythagorean poem. It is Empedocles' testification—in the tradition of Pythagoras himself, who professed to have recollected a number of his past lives—that he has fully perceived the nature, not of the universe now, but of his own soul, with its history of suffering in previous lives and in its present state of liberation.

We have far fewer pieces of Purifications than of On Nature, and their order is more problematic. The title refers to purificatory rites of initiation into mysteries. Fragment 143 is probably a reference to ritual purification with water, but it is better to take the title as indicating that the poem as a whole is an act of purification and an initiation into mysteries. Empedocles was accused of being one of the first (with Philolaus) to reveal the secret teachings and practices of the Pythagoreans. It is not unlikely that we have here bits of the first large-scale publicization of such esoteric (to fifth-century Greeks) dogmas as the existence of an occult self, its immortality and metempsychosis, the sinfulness of killing/consuming ensouled beings, and karmic retribution through an individual's successive lives. What is not revealed in our fragments, except perhaps obliquely, is the askesis—the spiritual training—that the Pythagoreans undertook. I am not referring to their way of life in general, which we know included communal living, vegetarianism, sexual restrictions, a rule of silence and the use of music as catharsis—but to what is known as Pythagorean “memory-training” (anamnesis). The master in fragment 129 is almost certainly Pythagoras, whose “visceral mind” (translation of prapides—the mind as located in the upper abdomen) took in each and every existent for ten or even twenty human generations. This is a more developed form—extending through time—of the practice inculcated in On Nature, and it may have been part of a Pythagorean practice that led ultimately to self-knowledge in a radical sense, a knowledge that begins with the recollection of the forms the self has already assumed. The transformations that are without any self-nature in On Nature have become personal history in Purifications:

I have already been
          a boy and a girl
          a bush and a bird
                              a mute fish in the sea.

(fr. 117)

The final transformation that Empedocles claims for himself, from mortal man to god, he refuses to regard as “some great accomplishment” (fr. 113). This refusal seems to be not humility—a nonvirtue for Empedocles as for most Greeks—but a recognition that there is in the end, to use Buddhist terms, “no attainment and nothing to attain.” The gods exist in bliss as humans exist in suffering; but beyond such differences in state, yet pervading them, there is

one awesome Mind
          inexpressibly alone
riddling the universe
with its lightspeed thoughts …
a continuum through the aether
through the infinite brightness.

(frs. 134-135)

Empedocles never forgot Parmenides' One, and when he returns to it here we feel he has liberated it from the bonds and limitations that Parmenides' Goddess insisted were upon it, leaving us with a glimpse of a Mind with no need of purification and a universe without any hindrance in it.