From the Beginning to Plato

EMPEDOCLES 169
as well as Aphrodite. No mortal has perceived her as she moves among
them, but pay attention to my line of argument, which will not mislead you.
(fr. 17.21–6)
The existence of the opposed stimuli is to be inferred from an understanding of
how the elements act and react to each other, and any apparent personification is
a question of allegory or poetic licence.
Empedocles described his principles of attraction and repulsion in terms of
equal balance and power. They are able to extend over the elements and act on
them, with expanding and contracting areas of application as the four are brought
together or held further apart. Love ‘increases’ and takes up more place in the
sense that more and more elemental particles may be brought together to mingle,
and the converse holds ‘when Strife rises to its honours as the time is completed’
(fr. 30), and the elements move out of their combinations to group with their own
kind. The two principles are manifest in the patterns of attraction and separation
of the elements, and are contained within the same limits as them. In
Empedocles’ theory the consequences of this wide-ranging polar opposition are
to be found at different levels: in the repeated patterns of movements and
arrangements of the elements within the cosmos, in the genesis and destruction
of successive generations of mortal life, and for individuals in their friendships
and enmities.
COSMOLOGY
Empedocles’ four-element cosmos was a spherical everlasting plenum.
Parmenides had previously argued that it is peculiarly self-contradictory to assert
the existence of ‘what is not’ (mē on). Applied temporally this meant that there
could be no generation or destruction (which would entail earlier or later nonexistence),
and in spatial terms there had to be continuity, balance and
homogeneity ‘as in the bulk of a well-rounded sphere’. Empedocles took this as
the literal shape of the cosmos, and, as has been shown, further adapted the
Eleatic argument by equating the non-existent with kenon (empty space), and
then denying its existence: ‘there is no part of the whole that is empty or
overfull’ (fr. 13).
The atomists later agreed with this identification of non-being with empty
space, but then reinstated it as an existing void. In Empedocles’ theory, however,
the elements are contained within the cosmos with no spaces between them, nor
did he allow the possibility of variation in consistency; this possibility had been
adopted by the Ionian Anaximenes previously, to account for differences
between solid, liquid and gaseous substances by assuming a process of
rarefaction and condensation of primary matter. For Empedocles, earth, air, fire
and water assimilate and separate in the plenum, shifting together and moving
apart in continually changing arrangements and rearrangements, while each
keeps its character inviolate.