From the Beginning to Plato

184 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
separating of them at death and their subsequent rearrangement into other forms
is common to both poems. The boy, girl, bush, bird and fish of fragment 117 are
obvious examples of the types of mortal life that the daimōn assumes as he goes
from one hard way of life to another, and they are lives in different elements.
Empedocles has explained that, according to necessity and universal law, coming
under Strife results in so-called birth as tbnēton, ‘a mortal thing’; so, finding
himself as prophet, leader, minstrel and healer at the highest stage of mortal life
he would suppose that the law had run its course in his case. Since this involves
lives in different elements, he might well consider that he has himself been born
in some way as a bird in the air, fish in the sea and plant on earth. This need not
imply that he remembers being in these states; it is an inference from the law that
the daimōn of necessity takes on a variety of forms.
Like the four roots, Love and Strife have their place in the Katharmoi; the
terminology is similar, and it is the account of their nature and function in the
Physics that helps in the understanding of their role in this second context. The
principle of Philia throughout is responsible for universal friendship, unity and
the good of the cosmos; Strife, ‘raging’ and ‘destructive’, is the cause of hatred,
enmity and separation. In the Physics bodies were said to grieve at their birth in
hatred and anger, and to be ‘torn apart by evil strifes’ (frs. 20 and 22); the theme
is repeated in the representation of this world in the Katharmoi as ‘a joyless
place’ and ‘the field of blind delusion’ (fr. 121).
The traditional mythology of anthropomorphic gods was rejected by
Empedocles, and instead he gave the elements the names of Olympian gods—
Zeus, Hera and Hephaestus—to signify immortality and universal power. He also
replaced the former age of the Titan Kronos, the time of ‘the golden race of
mortals’ in Hesiod’s poem, with the past sovereignty of Love as Kypris, and this
in turn reflected the description of the cosmic sphere under Love as an ideal and
blessed state of harmony, with strife absent. A place was found however for the
more conventional ‘long-lived gods, highest in honour’ as the original daimones
‘who have a share of blessed life’, and as divinities in the final stage of a series
of lives that include plants, animals and humans (fr. 128, quoted above). These
are all temporary arrangements of elements, in which the combinations that are
gods are distinguished merely because they last longer before their inevitable
dissolution than the other forms of life, as he explains:
trees sprang from [the elements], and men and women, animals and birds
and water-nourished fish, and long-lived gods too, highest in honour.
(fr. 21)
This erasing of the dividing line between men and gods, which in the epic
tradition was fixed and except in rare cases impassable, has two effects. One is to
reduce the level of these gods by showing them superior only in having a longer
and happier existence than other forms; the second is to raise the status of plants,
animals and humans by recognizing in them a nature akin to that of honoured