Empedocles
Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, poet, physician and thaumaturge (c. 494–434 BC), born in Agrigentum, in Sicily, a figure surrounded since antiquity by a legendary aura combining rational philosophical reflection with religious practice and a reputation for working miracles, which he himself actively cultivated by presenting himself in his own verses as a god exiled among mortals. Politically active in his home city, where he championed democratic positions against the local oligarchy, his philosophical work, transmitted fragmentarily in two hexameter poems, On Nature and Purifications, constitutes one of the most original syntheses of pre-Socratic philosophy. In On Nature he sets out his theory of the four elements or 'roots' (fire, air, water and earth) as eternal, unchanging components of all material reality, whose combination and separation — governed by two opposing cosmic forces he calls Love (Philia) and Strife or Discord (Neikos) — explains all generation and decay of things in the sensible world without needing, as Parmenides did, to appeal to the logical impossibility of change. This cyclical cosmological scheme, in which the universe oscillates eternally between a phase of total unity under the dominion of Love (the Sphere) and a phase of total dispersal under the dominion of Strife, decisively influenced the theory of the four elements that Aristotle would adopt and that would dominate Western physics for more than two thousand years. In Purifications, by contrast, he develops an Orphic-Pythagorean religious doctrine of the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), according to which fallen 'daimons', himself among them, must wander for thousands of years, reincarnating in various life forms as punishment for a primordial guilt, until fully purified. Ancient legend, perhaps apocryphal, relates that Empedocles died by throwing himself into the crater of Mount Etna to prove his own divinity.