Empedocles
c. 495 BCE–c. 435 BCE · Acragas
Sicilian philosopher-poet who proposed the four elements (fire, air, water, earth) governed by Love and Strife; combined Pythagorean reincarnation with Eleatic ontology.
“For before now I have been at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea.”
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AcragasMagna Graecia (Sicily)
What they did here
Empedocles was born at Acragas (Akragas/Agrigentum) in Sicily c.494 BCE into a prominent family; his grandfather had won an Olympic victory (Diogenes Laertius 8.51-53).
About Acragas
A magnificent and immensely wealthy Greek city of southern Sicily—adorned with its still-standing Valley of the Temples—and the home of Empedocles, the philosopher-poet who taught that all things are made of four roots bound and parted by Love and Strife.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Empedocles’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.