“Love and Strife: the one brings things together, the other drives them apart.”
— EmpedoclesCommonly cited paraphrase of Diels-Kranz 31 B17 and B22, preserved in Simplicius and Aristotle; not a verbatim rendering
Commentary
This paraphrase summarises the two cosmic forces that govern the mixing and separation of the four roots, one uniting them and the other dividing them. The forces give the poem its dynamic structure, alternating between periods of unity under Love and periods of dispersal under Strife. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield describe the cosmic cycle that the forces produce, in which the world moves from a sphere of total mixture to a state of complete separation and back again. Daniel Graham emphasises that Love and Strife are not personified moral agents but physical powers whose effects can be described in mechanical terms. Richard Wright's edition gives the fullest collection of the relevant lines and shows how the poem varies its language for the two forces. Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, criticises the pairing for failing to explain the mechanism of change, a criticism that remains influential. The sentence is a paraphrase, not a verified quotation, and should be labelled as such.
Commentary
This paraphrase summarises the two cosmic forces that govern the mixing and separation of the four roots, one uniting them and the other dividing them. The forces give the poem its dynamic structure, alternating between periods of unity under Love and periods of dispersal under Strife. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield describe the cosmic cycle that the forces produce, in which the world moves from a sphere of total mixture to a state of complete separation and back again. Daniel Graham emphasises that Love and Strife are not personified moral agents but physical powers whose effects can be described in mechanical terms. Richard Wright's edition gives the fullest collection of the relevant lines and shows how the poem varies its language for the two forces. Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, criticises the pairing for failing to explain the mechanism of change, a criticism that remains influential. The sentence is a paraphrase, not a verified quotation, and should be labelled as such.