Empedocles c. 490 BC – c. 430 BC

Empedocles of Acragas was an ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher of the 5th century BC, born in the Greek city of Acragas in Sicily. His doctrine of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, mixed and separated by the cosmic forces of Love and Strife, was the dominant account of natural change in Greek and medieval thought until the early modern period. His two surviving philosophical poems, On Nature and the Purifications, develop his cosmology, his theory of perception, and a doctrine of the transmigration of souls. He was reputed in antiquity to have died by leaping into the volcano on Mount Etna, perhaps to confirm rumours of his divinity. He left a deep impression on subsequent Greek thought and was one of the major Pre-Socratic interlocutors for Plato and Aristotle.

Empedocles was born around 490 BC at Acragas, the wealthy Greek city on the southern coast of Sicily. The son of an aristocratic family, he played an active part in the democratic politics of his city after the fall of the tyranny of Thrasydaeus, refusing the kingship that, the tradition reports, was offered to him by his fellow citizens. He was associated with Pythagorean and Eleatic circles and was claimed in antiquity as a physician, an orator, and a religious teacher.

Two long hexameter poems are attributed to him, On Nature and the Purifications; about a fifth of On Nature survives in fragments preserved by later authors, and the recently recovered Strasbourg papyrus has substantially enlarged the extant text. His system divides reality into four everlasting roots — earth, water, air, and fire — drawn together and apart by the cosmic forces of Love and Strife in alternating cycles, with the soul migrating through bodies in punishment for an original sin against Love.

Empedocles thus provided the first articulation of the four-element theory that, mediated by Aristotle, would dominate physical thought into the early modern period, and combined it with a religious doctrine of transmigration. The famous story that he leapt into the crater of Mount Etna to confirm his divinity is a late embroidery; he is reported to have died around 430 BC, perhaps in the Peloponnese.