ABSTRACT
EmfJedoclean PanfJsychism The unity of Empedocles' thought imposes on interpreters a stronger ohliga-
tion than before to take the entire corpus as a set, to attempt an interpretation in which all pieces must have a place.' The first step in this undertaking will be to consider which fragment(s) can better serve as a general framework. According to the traditional division of the corpus, two fragments provided the respective and mutually incompatihle frameworks for each poem. The Peri Phuseos took as its foundation the exposition of the cycle found in B 17, whereas fragment B 115 presented the central theme of the Katharmoi.2 The contrast in outlook each provides at a first glance, it must he admitted, can seem quite stark. Whereas B 17 is a long, mostly impersonal account of the ultimate constituents of the universe, outlining their hehavior and arguing for their absolute reality, B 115 describes the punishments long-lived daimones undergo after perjury or befouling themselves with blood, according to an "oracle of Necessity." This consists in a series of toilsome reincarnations through each of the great world-masses, and ends on a startling first-person confession by Empedocles that "I too am now one of these, a fugitive from god, in thrall to raving Strife." The main problem, as correctly discerned hy Zeller, is that neither appears to have any obvious connection to the other. On the one hand, we have an impersonal, objective, and potentially reductionist physics, contrasting with, on the other, a dramatic and personal myth, enjoining the hearer to adopt a "pure" way of life and perhaps promising thereby some form of salvation. To many, as outlined above, it has seemed that there is simply no reconciling these two perspectives. At the very least, it would not be wrong to say that we have in each the germs of two competing outlooks, whose claims, at least since the Enlightenment, have been felt to be less and less capable of agree men t.
