From the Beginning to Plato

174 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
cause’. The particular ratio here of four parts fire: two earth: two water (or on an
alternative version one each of water and air) is a simple one, but the
achievement is in the understanding of the principle of proportion in the
formation of organisms rather than any sophistication in its development.
The last line of the quotation—‘marvellously held together by the gluing of
harmony’—shows the ‘bonding’ of the elements, not as an additional ingredient,
but inherent in their attraction when they come together in the right formula.
Another way for the poet to express this is was to envisage the artisan-goddess
fashioning living forms as artefacts:
When Kypris was busily producing forms, she moistened earth in water
and gave it to swift fire to harden.
(fr. 73)
In other fragments she acted as a baker or sculptor, and sometimes as a
carpenter, joining the organic parts together. More conventionally, she
personified the sexual urge, the mutual desire that brings male and female
together, and ensures the continuation of the species. The theme continued in a
section devoted to embryology, which included an account of sex differentiation
within the womb. This was a subject which interested many pre-Socratics, and
Empedocles’ medical experience may have sharpened his concerns in this area.
On one occasion, when he maintained that both the male and female contribute
to the embryo’s substance, matching like the two parts of a tally, he was closer to
the truth of the shared parental donation of chromosomes than was Aristotle with
his preference for the domination of the male.
In his account of life now on earth Empedocles had explanations for a wide
variety of phenomena, from the structure of trees, plants and fruits through to a
broad range of animal species. He comments for example on the normal
combination of hard bone surrounded by soft flesh as an instance of a chance
compound developing a formal structure, represented as the artisan at work:
bones within and flesh as an outer covering, a kind of flaccidity chanced on
at the hands of Kypris
(fr. 75)
but in some creatures the hard and soft tissues are reversed:
In those with heavy backs who live in the sea…you will notice that earth is
on the top surface of the flesh of sea-snails and stony-skinned turtles.
(fr. 76)
Here the collecting and hardening of earth ‘on top’ is a means of protection for
the organism, and this prevails over the tendency of earth to come to the centre.