I frammenti di Empedocle

• Some portions of the above paragraphs are translated and condensed from Zeller, some others from Vorlander, Geschichte der Philosophie, I. Band, Leipsic, 1903. THE POETRY OF EMPEDOCLES. Empedocles and his forerunner Parmenides were the only Greek philosophers who wrote down their systems in verse; for Heraclitus had written in crabbed prose, and Xenophanes was more poetsatirist than poet-philosopher. Lucretius, the poetical disciple of Empedocles (though not in the same degree that he was the philosophic disciple of Epicurus), is in this their only successor. Contemporary reflective satire and the metrical forms of the Orphics may, as Burnet conjectured, have suggested the innovation; but both Parmenides and Empedocles were poets by nature, and I see no reason why they should not naturally and spontaneously have chosen the poet's splendid privilege of verse for their thought. The Ionic dialect of Empedocles's hexameters, and occasionally even his phrase, is Homeric; but in mood and manner, as sometimes in philosophic terminology, he recalls the Eleatic. Parmenides had written : "And thou shalt know the Source etherial, And all the starry signs along the sky. And the resplendent works of that clear lamp Of glowing sun, and whence they all arose. Likewise of wandering works of round^eyed moon Shalt thou yet learn and of her source ; and then Shalt thou know too the heavens that close us round-Both whence they sprang and how Fate leading them Bound fast to keep the limits of the stars How earth and sun and moon and common sky, The Milky Way, Ol3mipos outermost. And burning might of stars made haste to be."* •Parmenides, fr. lo, ii, Diels, FV. lO THE FRAGMENTS OF EMPEDOCLES. And it is as if he were addressing the Agrigentine and bequeathing him his spiritual heritage; and we might add thereto those verses of another poet of more familiar times : "And thou shalt write a song like mine, and yet Much more than mine, as thou art more than I.…