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On Nature

Empedocles

A didactic poem in hexameters setting out Empedocles' physics. Nothing is born or perishes: four eternal roots—Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis, that is, fire, air or earth, and water depending on the interpretation—are only mixed and separated under Love, which unites, and Strife, which separates. The cosmos alternates between the unity of the Sphere and dispersion, and in the intermediate phases living beings arise, first as loose limbs combining at random. It includes a theory of perception through effluences and pores, the comparison of breathing with the clepsydra and a physiology of the blood as the seat of thought.