From the Beginning to Plato

EMPEDOCLES 183
their mother, and having deprived them of life devour the flesh of those
they love.
(fr. 137)
The citizens of Acragas are urged to give up such practices, which further the work
of strife, and instead to honour the power of love, personified as Kypris, in the
old way:
with holy images and painted animal figures, with perfumes of subtle
fragrance…and libations of golden honey.
(fr. 128.5–7)
Empedocles apparently extended the injury to the common bond of life displayed
in animal sacrifice even to plants, for Plutarch, in the context of fragment 140:
‘keep completely from leaves of laurel’, reports a prohibition against tearing off
leaves because of the injury to the parent tree. He also links the themes once
more in another fragment, which gives a ranking of the highest types of plants
and animals in a scale of an exchange of lives:
Among animals they are born as lions that make their lair in the hills and
bed on the ground, and among fair-leafed trees as laurels.
(fr. 127)
And finally the highest human lives are listed, as the last stage before becoming
a god:
And at the end as prophets, minstrels, healers and princes they come
among men on earth; and from these they arise as gods, highest in honour.
(fr. 128)
The ways in which the subject-matter of these fragments bears on those already
discussed as from the Physics may now be explored. Any interpretation should
be based on the direct quotations as far as possible, for there is very little reliable
external evidence, and the comments of ancient authors, even when giving a
quotation, have to be used with caution, and stripped as far as possible of their
own particular bias.
It is appropriate to start with the four elements. A daimōn is the term given in
the Katharmoi to an individual divinity, the enhanced form of life that is superior
to a human but still a temporary compound of the true immortals, the four
elements. When, in fragment 115 quoted above, it is said that the air drives the
daimōn into sea, sea casts him on to earth, earth into sun, and sun back to the
swirling air, these areas of banishment refer explicitly to the masses of the four
elements described and explained in the Physics. The language of ‘a changing of
the paths’ for the combining of living creatures from elemental parts, the