Commentary

This fragment, the most frequently cited of Empedocles' surviving lines, names the four roots, fire, air, earth, and water, under the names of divinities, and so presents the elements as both physical stuffs and objects of religious reverence. The naming of earth as Hera, fire as Zeus, and water as Nestis reflects the poem's fusion of cosmology and theology. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, in The Presocratic Philosophers, argue that the divine names are best understood as the poet's way of marking the elements as the fundamental powers of the cosmos. Daniel Graham, in his study of Empedocles' physics, emphasises that the four-root doctrine is a theory of mixture in which no element is more basic than the others. Richard Wright, in Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (1981), notes that the mythological names are a deliberate feature of the poem's style. Jean Bollack's large edition of the fragments treats the naming as a hieratic gesture. The English here is an approximation of the Greek, and the translation should be checked against Wright or Inwood before quotation, since the terms for the divinities are interpreted in different ways.