“In Love all things come together into one; in Strife they are carried apart each from the others.”
— EmpedoclesParaphrase of Diels-Kranz 31 B17 and B22 as reported in Simplicius; approximate English rendering
Commentary
This sentence describes the two cosmic phases in which the forces of Love and Strife bring the roots into full unity or full separation. It summarises a central element of the poem's cosmology, in which the world is a cycle of mixture and dispersal governed by the two forces. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield present this cycle as the structural core of the physics, and they show how the periodic return of unity and separation avoids the need for a single origin. Daniel Graham argues that the forces should be read as physical tendencies rather than moral agents, and he compares them with the later notion of attraction and repulsion. Richard Wright's collection of the fragments shows the variety of language Empedocles used for the two phases. Aristotle criticised the account for its failure to specify the mechanism of the forces, a criticism that set the agenda for later discussion. The English is an approximation, and the Greek in Simplicius should be checked before quotation.
Commentary
This sentence describes the two cosmic phases in which the forces of Love and Strife bring the roots into full unity or full separation. It summarises a central element of the poem's cosmology, in which the world is a cycle of mixture and dispersal governed by the two forces. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield present this cycle as the structural core of the physics, and they show how the periodic return of unity and separation avoids the need for a single origin. Daniel Graham argues that the forces should be read as physical tendencies rather than moral agents, and he compares them with the later notion of attraction and repulsion. Richard Wright's collection of the fragments shows the variety of language Empedocles used for the two phases. Aristotle criticised the account for its failure to specify the mechanism of the forces, a criticism that set the agenda for later discussion. The English is an approximation, and the Greek in Simplicius should be checked before quotation.