ABSTRACT
The doctrines of Empedocles seem to derive from the mixture of three influences, however they may have come to him— Pythagoreanism (in the religious beliefs which make it akin to Orphicism and also in its scientific spirit), Eleaticism, and the philosophy of Heracleitos. It is doubtful whether lie owes anything to Leucippos the Atomist or to Anaxagoras; though he was younger than the latter, his writings are earlier, according to Aristotle. 1 He belonged to an aristocratic family of Acragas, one of the liveliest and most prosperous cities in Sicily. His life, which seems to fall between the ten first years of the Vth century and about 430, is less known to us than his character, about which tradition and his own utterances give us information. He believed himself invested with a supernatural power. “Friends/’ he says solemnly at the beginning of his poem, the Purifications (καθαρμοί), “I am come to you as an immortal god, honoured among all as is fitting to my nature, my brow bound with fillets and flowery wreaths. When I go into the thriving cities with this train of men and women, I am venerated. Thousands hasten to follow me. They ask me the road which shall lead them to advantage; some ask for oracles, others, who suffer from a thousand maladies, would hear the word which heals” (Frag. 112). He knows that he brings truth, but “the assault of belief on the heart” is jealously combated by incredulous distrust (Frag. 114). Moreover, the end of his poem On Nature hardly leaves any doubt that the object of the study of nature is, in his eyes, to enable us to exert arbitrary, absolute influence on things by magical means. “All the remedies which are a succour against ills and old age,” he says to his disciple Pausanias, “you shall learn them.… You shall calm the rage of the unwearying winds… and you shall bring back repairing breaths when you wish. For the good of men, you shall make drought follow rain, and rain follow drought.… And you shall make the soul of a dead man come out of Hades” (Frag. 111). Tradition, too, speaks of the sombre gravity of his pose, the royal pomp with which he surrounded himself, and the various miracles which he performed. In short, it seems that, like Pythagoras, Empedocles was at an early date recognized by enthusiastic admirers as the supernatural man he believed himself to be.
