ABSTRACT
Instead, I will devote the remaining pages of this study to the investigation of those last fragments which can be considered within the literary structure of book I.
171ensemble a are bound to be controversial for some time to come, especially as the sections newly revealed to us by the Strasbourg papyrus become the object of fuller scholarly debate. It would, in addition, prolong matters intolerably to rehearse here the whole history of controversy surrounding the interpretation of the cosmic cycle. In essence, that history has consisted of a series of challenges to a view of the cycle first advanced by Panzerbieter (1844), based upon his emendation of lines B 17.3-5.7 According to that more orthodox interpretation, Empedocles' cycle consists of a symmetrical alternation between the complete dominance of Love, then Strife, over the four elements, resulting in a double creation and destruction of life within each complete revolution of the cycle. The central objection to such a view, raised in various ways over the intervening years, is that the extant fragments present a great disproportion in the depiction of zoogonic and cosmogonic activity on the part of Love and Strife. More specifically, over against the numerous passages where Love is depicted as the fashioner of life or at least organs, Strife is only rarely described as a zoogonic power (and vice versa for cosmogony). Nevertheless, for reasons to long to enter into here, I think that material from the papyrus has now vindicated the traditional, symmetrical interpretation. x In the end, while the disproportion in depiction of these activities is real, and probably reflects the original, Empedocles nevertheless also remained committed to a view of Love and Strife as equals.9 Omitting for now various details concerning each individual phase of the cycle, I offer the following in the hope that it can now stand as the most viable account of the cosmic cycle.
