Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Timaeus opposes these accounts, explicitly stating that he departed for the Peloponnese and never returned at all; whence his end also remains unknown. In his fourteenth book he directs his rebuttal against Heraclides by name: for Peisianax was a Syracusan and possessed no estate in Acragas; and Pausanias, had such a report been spread, would have made a memorial for his friend, either a statuette or a shrine as for a god; for he was indeed wealthy. "How then," he says, "did he leap into the craters, of which, being near at hand, he had never even made mention? He died, therefore, in the Peloponnese.

​Nor is it anything strange that his tomb does not appear; for neither does that of many others." Having said such things, Timaeus adds: "But Heraclides is always such a teller of marvels, even saying that a man fell from the moon." Hippobotus says that a draped statue of Empedocles formerly stood in Acragas, but later stood uncovered before the Roman senate house, the Romans obviously having transferred it there; for painted likenesses are indeed circulated even now. Neanthes of Cyzicus, who also wrote about the Pythagoreans, says that upon Meton's death the beginning of a tyranny was sprouting up; and then Empedocles persuaded the Acragantines to cease their factions and practice political equality.

​Furthermore, since many of the female citizens were without dowry, he provided them with dowries through his available wealth; wherefore he also donned purple and put on a golden fillet, as Favorinus says in his Memorabilia; and bronze shoes besides, and a Delphic wreath. He had thick hair and attendants following him; and he was always gloomy and of a single demeanor. In such guise he would go forth, the citizens meeting him and considering this as if it were a badge of a kind of kingship. Later, when traveling on a carriage as if to Messene for a festival, he fell and fractured his thigh; and falling ill from this, he died at seventy-seven years of age. And there is also a tomb of his in Megara.

​Concerning his years Aristotle disagrees; for he says that he died at sixty years of age; others, however, say one hundred and nine. He was at his prime in the eighty-fourth Olympiad. Demetrius of Troezen in his book Against the Sophists says that, in the manner of Homer, "Having fastened a steep noose from a lofty cornel-tree, he suspended his neck, and his soul descended to Hades." In the aforementioned letter of Telauges, it is said that he died having slipped into the sea through old age. Such and so many are the accounts concerning his death. There is also a poem of ours directed at him in the Pammetros, written in a mockingly satirical vein, running in this manner:

"You too once, Empedocles, having cleansed your body with living flame, drank fire from the immortal craters; I will not say that you willingly cast yourself into the stream of Etna, but wishing to remain hidden, you fell in against your will." And another: "Yes indeed, there is an account that Empedocles died when once from a carriage he fell and broke his right thigh; but if he leapt into the craters of fire and drank down his life, how could a tomb of this man still be shown in Megara?"

​His doctrines were as follows: the elements are four, fire, water, earth, air; and Love by which they are combined, and Strife by which they are separated. He speaks thus: "Bright Zeus, and life-giving Hera, and Aidoneus, and Nestis, who with tears moistens mortal springs;" calling fire Zeus, earth Hera, air Aidoneus, and water Nestis. "And these," he says, "never cease continually interchanging," as though such an arrangement of the universe were eternal; at any rate, he adds: "at one time all coming together into one through Love, and at another each being borne apart through the hatred of Strife."

​He also says that the sun is a great mass of fire and larger than the moon; that the moon is disc-shaped, and the sky itself crystalline. And that the soul clothes itself in all manner of forms of animals and plants; at any rate he says: "For already once I have been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a leaping fish of fire." His On Nature and Purifications extend to five thousand verses, while the Medical Treatise extends to six hundred verses. Concerning the tragedies, we have spoken beforehand.