Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Putting Fragments in Their Places: The Lost Works by Empedocles

Putting Fragments in Their Places: The Lost Works by Empedocles AbstractThe author deals with the lost works of Empedocles, an often neglected subject, in the frame of the discussion concerning the number of the poems and their main features. He reviews the traces of the Passage of Xerxes, of the Medical Discourse, and of the Proem to Apollo among the fragments and witnesses, taking his cue from textual aspects and dealing with the contents, the significance of each of these writings in Empedocles’ culture and thought and their multifarious relationships with his times. As to the Passage, he tries to reconcile the contrasting interpretations so far proposed (historical or religious poem). Concerning B111, the only relic from the Medical Discourse, he explains why its contents are incompatible with the Physical Poem and the Purifications. He analyzes the Proem to Apollo in several perspectives (text, witnesses, contents also from the epistemological point of view, literary genre). He assigns fragments 131–134 and 142 to the Proem, drawing one of his arguments from the comparison with the third Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and also suggesting a relationship with an intellectual cult of the sun. Formal features help to ascribe each fragment to the relevant poem. Close similarities between fragments do not necessarily mean that they come from the same writing: Empedocles is wont to allude to one poem of his while composing another. The author concludes that the striving for a reductio ad unum of the Acragantine’s output, also evident in the attempt by a number of scholars to make only one poem out of the Περὶ φύσεως and the Καθαρμοί, has often led researchers to take for granted that none of the fragments preserved might belong to the lost works. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Elenchos de Gruyter

Putting Fragments in Their Places: The Lost Works by Empedocles

Santaniello, Carlo
Elenchos , Volume 43 (2): 32 – Dec 1, 2022
Download PDF
32 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/putting-fragments-in-their-places-the-lost-works-by-empedocles-XWdoFLQ43w
Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
0392-7342
eISSN
2037-7177
DOI
10.1515/elen-2022-0013
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractThe author deals with the lost works of Empedocles, an often neglected subject, in the frame of the discussion concerning the number of the poems and their main features. He reviews the traces of the Passage of Xerxes, of the Medical Discourse, and of the Proem to Apollo among the fragments and witnesses, taking his cue from textual aspects and dealing with the contents, the significance of each of these writings in Empedocles’ culture and thought and their multifarious relationships with his times. As to the Passage, he tries to reconcile the contrasting interpretations so far proposed (historical or religious poem). Concerning B111, the only relic from the Medical Discourse, he explains why its contents are incompatible with the Physical Poem and the Purifications. He analyzes the Proem to Apollo in several perspectives (text, witnesses, contents also from the epistemological point of view, literary genre). He assigns fragments 131–134 and 142 to the Proem, drawing one of his arguments from the comparison with the third Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and also suggesting a relationship with an intellectual cult of the sun. Formal features help to ascribe each fragment to the relevant poem. Close similarities between fragments do not necessarily mean that they come from the same writing: Empedocles is wont to allude to one poem of his while composing another. The author concludes that the striving for a reductio ad unum of the Acragantine’s output, also evident in the attempt by a number of scholars to make only one poem out of the Περὶ φύσεως and the Καθαρμοί, has often led researchers to take for granted that none of the fragments preserved might belong to the lost works.

Journal

Elenchos – de Gruyter

Published: Dec 1, 2022

Keywords: Empedocles; lost works; epistemology; Holy Mind; fr. 142

There are no references for this article.