This revised edition of The Poem of Empedocles (1992) integrates substantial new material from a recently discovered papyrus containing evidence of over seventy lines or part lines of poetry, of which more than fifty are both new and usable.

The Poem of Empedocles is a completely new edition of the fragments of Empedocles, which presents the Greek text and a new verse translation on facing pages. Also included are the testimonia from Diels-Kranz (for the first time translated into English), and a very full selection of frangment contexts, much of it material which has never before been translated into any modern language. The fragments are presented in their original contexts, which makes possible a fresh reading of the full evidence for Empedocles' thought. In this edition Brad Inwood argues for a new view of the character of Empedocles' philosophical work. In the introduction he makes a sustained case for there being only one poem originally, rather than two as has usually been thought, and explores the philosophical implications of this thesis at length. He offers new interpretations of Empedocles' metaphysics, epistemology, religious philosophy, andcosmology, and relates the work of Empedocles to Aristotle's critique.

This book consists of a thorough study of Lucretius’ poetic and philosophical debt to Empedocles, focusing on their respective uses of analogy and examining how both poets turn these poetic techniques to use in their epistemological approaches to nature.

Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus the most important of the pre-Socratic philosophers, were at the same time among the greatest poets of the ancient world. But their work is rarely treated and still more rarely translated in its original form--as poetry. The complete extant fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles are collected here for the first time in a translation responsive to the original verse texts. Parmenides' philosophical fragments are here given as the poetic remains of the thinker from Elea in Southern Italy whom Socrates wondered at and Plato held in awe. What emerges from the poetry is at once an uncompromising vision of absolute Being and a compassionate understanding of the human cosmos: It is the body grows to Mind. All men desire the same thing, apprehend the same The plenum is thought, and thought preponderates. The poetry of Empedocles--reincarnationist, naturalist, cosmologist, religious leader, physiologist, and a metaphysician--is presented here in the personal idiom of the fifth-century Sicilian who has been called the last of the Greek shamans: I have already been A bush and a bird A boy and a girl A mute fish in the sea.

The definitive scholarly edition and new translation of all three versions of Hölderlin’s poem, The Death of Empedocles, and his related theoretical essays.