From the Beginning to Plato

166 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
At their first appearance the four were given divine names, since they had now
taken the place of the traditional gods as the true immortals, but Empedocles’
vocabulary was not consistent. As well as the names of gods and goddesses, he
also listed them by the common terms of fire, air, earth and water, or by their
most obvious manifestations as sun, sky, earth (chthōn as well as gaia), and sea
or rain. He posited just these four, no more and no less, eternally existing, ever
the same, equal in privilege and power, but capable, as they mingle, separate and
reassemble, of producing a variety of phenomena. The evidence for their
individual characteristics, as for their very existence, was to be found in their
appearance as conglomerates in the natural world:
sun with its radiant appearance and pervading warmth, heavenly bodies
bathed in heat and shining light, rain everywhere dark and chill, and earth
the basis of firmly rooted solids.
(fr. 21.3–6)
Such qualitative differences as hot and cold, wet and dry, light and dark, remain
whether the four are separated out in perceived stretches of bright sky, mist, land
and sea, or brought together in compounds, in which the characteristics of the
predominating elements may be apparent, but others imperceptible because of
the smallness of the component particles.
Empedocles therefore considered the four roots or elements to be basic and
permanent corporeal entities, forming temporary arrangements as their parts
were brought into compounds of different shapes, although they themselves were
not subject to alteration of any kind. He constantly rammed the point home:
these are the only real things, but as they run through each other they
become different objects at different times, yet they are throughout forever
the same.
(fr. 17.34–5 and cf. 21.13–4, 26.3–4)
Birth and death, generation and destruction have to be accepted as illusory, the
consequence merely of the mingling and separating of parts of the elements in
various proportions, which give to the different structures their apparent
individuality. The context in fragment 21 explains further:
From them (the four ‘roots’) comes all that was and is and will be hereafter
—trees have sprung from them, and men and women, and animals and
birds and water-nourished fish, and long-lived gods too, highest in honour.
For these are the only real things, and as they run through each other they
assume different shapes, for the mixing interchanges them.
(fr. 21.9–14)