Empedocles (5th Century Bce–After 444 Bce)

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Empedocles(5th Century Bce–After 444 Bce)

Empedocles, the Greek poet, prophet, and natural philosopher, was the originator of the doctrine of four elements that dominated Western cosmology and medical thought down to the Renaissance. Empedocles was born in Acragas (Agrigento), Sicily, in the early fifth century BCE and died sometime after 444 BCE. He played a political role in his native city, apparently as a democratic leader, was later exiled, and traveled through other Greek colonies in southern Italy. In one of his poems he describes himself as a "deathless god, no longer a mortal," surrounded wherever he goes by admiring crowds asking for advice, for prophecy, and for a "healing word" to cure them from disease (Fr. 112). A number of anecdotes illustrate his reputation for supernatural powers (including the raising of the dead), and the legend that he died by throwing himself into the crater of Etna gives us an idea of the charismatic impression he left behind in the popular imagination. Modern scholars have often found it difficult to reconcile the scientific and the religious sides of Empedocles' thought. He expounded his views in powerful hexameters, of which considerable fragments are preserved from two distinct poems, On the Nature of Things (Peri Physeōs) and Purifications (Katharmoi).

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