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city, friend of Phoebus, intercessor between angry Heaven and suffering men. Coins were struck at Selinus to commemorate their liberation from the scourge. Two of them remain, on each of which Empedocles is represented standing by the side of Phoebus in his car. Phoebus is shooting with the bow of pestilence; but Empedocles restrains his hand, and curbs the horses, which seem rushing forward on the pathway of destruction.

Closely connected with his claim to divinity was the position which Empedocles assumed as an enchanter. Gorgias, his pupil, asserts that he often saw him at the magic rites. Nor are we to suppose that this wizardry was a popular misinterpretation of his real power as a physician and ⚫ philosopher. It is far more probable that Empedocles himself believed in the potency of incantations, and delighted in the ceremonies and mysterious songs by which the dead were recalled from Hades, and secrets of the other world wrang from unwilling fate. We can form to ourselves a picture of this stately and magnificent enchanter, convinced of his own supernatural ascendency, and animated by the wild enthusiasm of his ardent nature, alone among the mountains of Girgenti, or by the sea-shore, invoking the elemental deities to aid his incantations, and ascribing the forebodings of his own poetic spirit to external inspiration or the voice of gods. In solitary meditations he had wrought out a theory of the world, and had conceived the notion of a spiritual God, one and unseen, pure intellect, an everlasting omnipresent power, to whom might be referred those natural remedies that stopped the plague, or cured the sick, or found new channels for the streams. The early Greek philosophers were fond of attributing to some common wisdom' of the world, some animating soul or universal intellect, the arts and intuitions to which they had themselves attained. Therefore, with this belief predominating in his mind, it is not strange that he should have trusted to the divine efficacy of his own spells, and have regarded the results of observation as a kind of supernatural wisdom. To his friend Pausanias the physician he makes these lofty promises, 'Thou shalt learn every kind of medicines that avert diseases and the evils of old age. Thou too shalt curb the fury of untiring winds, and when it pleases thee thou shalt reverse thy charms and loose avenging storms. Thou shalt replace black rain-clouds with the timely drought that men desire, and when the summer's arid heat prevails thou shalt refresh the trees with showers that rustle in the thirsty corn. And thou shalt bring again from Hades the life

of a departed man.' Like the Pythagoreans whom he followed, he seems to have employed the fascination of music in effecting cures; it is recorded of him that he once arrested the hand of a young man about to slay his father, by chanting to the lyre a solemn soul-subduing strain. The strong belief in himself which Empedocles possessed, inspired him with immense personal influence, so that his looks, and words, and tones, went farther than the force of other men. He compelled them to follow and confide in him, like Orpheus, or like those lofty natures which in every age have had the power of leading and controlling others by innate supremacy. That Empedocles tried to exhibit this ascendency, and to heighten its effect by gorgeous raiment and profuse expenditure, by public ceremonies and mysterious modes of life, we need not doubt. There was much of the spirit of Paracelsus in Empedocles, and vanity impaired the simple grandeur of his genius. In every age of the world's history there have been some such men-men in whom the highest intellectual gifts are blent with weakness inclining them to superstitious juggleries. Not content with their philosophi cal pretensions or with poetical renown, they seek a more mysterious fame, and mix the pure gold of their reason with the dross of idle fancy. Their very weakness adds a glow of colour, which we miss in the whiter light of more purely scientific intellects. They are men in whom two natures cross-the poet and the philosopher, the mountebank and the seer, the divine and the fortune-teller, the rigorous analyst and the retailer of old wives' tales. But none have equalled Empedocles, in whose capacious idiosyncrasy the most opposite qualities found ample room for co-existence, who sincerely claimed the supernatural faculties which Paracelsus must have only half believed, and who lived at a time when poetry and fact were indistinguishably mingled, and when the world was still absorbed in dreams of a past golden age, and in rich foreshadowings of a boundless future.

We are not, therefore, surprised to read the fantastic legends which involve his death in mystery. Whatever ground of fact they may possess, they are wholly consistent with the picture we have formed to ourselves of the philosopher, and prove at least the superstition which had gathered round his name. One of these legends has served all ages as a moral of the futility of human designs, and the just reward of inordinate vanity. Every one who knows the name of Empedocles has heard that, having jumped into Etna in order to conceal the time and

manner of his death, and thus to establish | any rate, it is recorded that he impeached his divinity, fate frustrated his schemes by and procured the execution of the leaders casting up his brazen slippers on the cra- of the aristocracy, thus rescuing the liberty ter's edge. According to another legend, of his nation at the expense of his own sewhich resembles that of the death of Romu- curity. After a visit to Peloponnesus Emlus, of Edipus, and other divinized heroes, pedocles returned to Agrigentum, but was Empedocles is related to have formed one soon obliged to quit his home again by the of a party of eighty men who assembled to animosity of his political enemies. Where celebrate by sacrifice his restoration of the he spent the last years of his life, and died, dying woman. After their banquet they re- remains uncertain. tired to sleep. But Empedocles remained in his seat at table. When morning broke, Empedocles was nowhere to be found. In reply to the questions of his friends, some one asserted that he had heard a loud voice calling on Empedocles at midnight, and that, starting up, he saw a light from heaven and burning torches. Pausanias, who was present at the sacrificial feast, sent far and wide to inquire for his friend, wishing to test the truth of this report. But piety restrained his search, and he was secretly informed by heavenly messengers that Empedocles had won what he had sought, and that divine honours should be paid to him. This story rests on the authority of Heraclides Ponticus, who professed to have obtained it from Pausan

ias.

The one legend we may regard as the coinage of his foes, the other as a myth created by the superstitious admiration of his friends.

We have hitherto regarded Empedocles more in his private and priestly character than as a citizen. Yet it was not to be expected that a man so nobly born, and so remarkable for intellectual power, should play no public part in his native state. A Greek could hardly avoid meddling with politics even if he wished to do so, and Empedocles was not one to hide his genius in the comparative obscurity of private life. While he was still a young man, Theron, the wise tyrant of Agrigentum, died, and a powerful aristocracy endeavoured to enslave the state. Empedocles manfully resisted them, supporting the liberal cause with vehemence, and winning so much popular applause that he is even reported to have received and refused the offer of the kingly power. By these means he made himself many foes among the nobility of Agrigentum; it is also probable that suspicion attached to him for trying to establish in his native city the Pythagorean commonwealth, which had been extirpated in South Italy. That he loved spiritual dominion we have seen; and this he might have hoped to acquire more easily by taking the intellectual lead among citizens of equal rights, than by throwing in his lot with the aristocratic party, or by exposing himself to the dangers and absorbing cares of a Greek tyrant. At

It remains to estimate the poetical and philosophical renown of Empedocles. That his genius was highly valued among the ancients appears manifest from the panegyric of Lucretius. Nor did he fail to exhibit the versatility of his powers in every branch of poetical composition. Diogenes Laertius affirms that forty-three tragedies bearing his name were known to Hieronymus, from whom he drew materials for the life of Empedocles. Whether these tragedies were really written by the philosopher, or by another Sicilian of the same name, admits of doubt. But there is no reason why an author, possessed of such varied and distinguished talents as Empedocles, should not have tried this species of composition. Xenophanes is said to have composed tragedies; and Plato's youthful efforts would, we fondly imagine, have afforded the world fresh proofs of his commanding genius, had they escaped the flames to which they were condemned by his maturer judgment. No fragments of the tragedies of Empedocles survive; they probably belonged to the class of semi-dithyrambic compositions, which prevailed at Athens before the days of Eschylus, and which continued to be cultivated in Sicily. Some of the lyrical plays of the Italianssuch, for instance, as the Orfeo of Poliziano

may enable us to form an idea of these simple dramas. After the tragedies, Diogenes makes mention of political poems. These we may refer to the period of the early manhood of Empedocles, when he was engaged in combat with the domineering aris tocracy, and when he might have sought to spread his liberal principles through the medium of gnomic elegies, like those of Solon or Theognis. The fragments of the kabappor sufficiently display his style of earnest and imperious exhortation to make us believe that at a time of political contention he would not spare this powerful instrument of persuasion and attack. In the next place, we hear of an epic poem on the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, which Empedocles is said to have left unfinished, and which his sister or his daughter burned with other papers at his death. The great defeat of the Medes took place while Empedocles was still a

He therefore thought and wrote hexameters as naturally as the scientific men of the present day think and write their sentences and paragraphs, until the dis course is formed into a perfect whole. Allowing, then, for the subject of his poem, Empedocles was regarded by antiquity as first among the Greek didactic singers, though he competed with Parmenides for this dis tinction, and was placed upon a level with Lucretius. Lactantius mentions them both. together in his definition of this kind of poetry. And Aristotle, in another treatise, now lost, but quoted by Diogenes, praises the artistic genius of the philosopher in these words: Καὶ Ομηρικὸς ὁ Ἐμπεδοκλῆς καὶ δεινὸς περὶ τὴν φράσιν γέγονε μεταφορικός τε ὢν καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις περὶ τὴν ποιητικὴν ἐπιτεύγμασι Xpouevos. The epithet 'Ounpikos is very χρώμενος. just; for not only is it clear that Empedocles had studied the poems of Homer with care, and had imbibed their phraseology, but he also possessed a genius akin to that of Homer in love of simplicity, in fidelity to nature, in unimpeded onward flow of energetic verse.

youth. All Hellas had hung with breath- | utterance.
less expectation on the event of Marathon
and Salamis. The fall of Xerxes brought
freedom and relief from terrible anxiety, not
only to the towns of Attica and Peloponnese,
but also to the shores of Sicily and Italy.
It is not therefore unlikely that the triumph
which excited Simonides and Eschylus to
the production of masterpieces, may have
stirred the spirit of the youthful patriot of
Agrigentum. Another composition of Em-
pedocles, which perished under his sister's
hands, was a Proemium to Apollo. The
loss of this poem is deeply to be regretted.
Empedocles regarded himself as specially
protected by the god of song and medicine
and prophetic insight. His genius would
therefore naturally take its highest fight in
singing praises to this mighty patron. The
hymn to Zeus, which has been ascribed to
Cleanthes, and some of the pseudo-Orphic
declamations, may give us an idea of the
gravity and enthusiasm which Empedocles
would have displayed in treating so stirring a
theme. Of his remaining works we possess
fragments. The great poem on Nature, the
Lustral Precepts, and the Discourse on Medi-
cine, were all celebrated among the ancients.
Fortunately, the inductions to the first and
second of these have been preserved, and
some lines addressed to Pausanias may be
regarded as forming the commencement of
the third. It is from these fragments,
amounting in all to about 470 lines, that we
must form our judgment of Empedocles, the
poet and the sage.

That Empedocles was a poet of the didactic order is clear from the nature of his subjects. Even as early as the time of Aristotle, critics disputed as to whether poems written for the purpose of scientific instruction deserved the name of poetry. In the Poetics, Aristotle says,-ovder de Kowóν ἐστιν Ὁμήρῳ καὶ Ἐμπεδοκλεῖ πλὴν τὸ μέτρον· διο τὸν μὲν ποιητὴν δίκαιον καλεῖν, τὸν δὲ φυσιόλογον μᾶλλον ἢ ποιητήν. The title puotoloyos was of course generic, and might have been claimed by Heraclitus, on the strength of his prose writings, no less than by Empedocles. Lucretius, in the exordium to his poem, argues for the utility of disguising scientific precepts under the more attractive form of art; we sweeten the lips of the vessel that contains bitter medicine, in order to induce the child to take it readily. And not only had Empedocles this reason in his favour for the use of verse, but also, at the age in which he lived, it was still a novelty to write prose at all; nor would it have been consistent with his theories of inspiration, and with the mysticism he professed, to abandon the poetic form of

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The simile of the girl playing with a wa ter-clock, by which Empedocles illustrates his theory of respiration, and that of the lantern, which serves to explain his notion of the structure of the eye, are both of them Homeric in their unadorned simplicity and vigour. Again, such epithets as these, ToAvaíparov for the liver, iλácpa for the moon, gußens for the sun, Toλvorépavos for πολυστέφανος majesty, eμeрowes for harmony, and the constant repetition of θεοὶ δολιχαίωνες τιμῆσι péporot, have the true Homeric ring. Like Homer, he often chooses an epithet specific of the object which he wishes to describe, but not especially suited to the matter of his argument. Thus πολυκλαύτων γυναίκων occurs when there was no particular reason to fix the mind upon the tearfulness of women. But the poetic value of the passage is increased by the mind being thus carried away from the logical order of ideas to a generality on which it can repose. At other times, when this is necessary, the epithets are as accurately descriptive as those of a botanist or zoologist: év Koyyaioi Padaσσovoμóis ßaρυνώτοις . . . . λιθοῤῥίνων τε χελωνών, for example. Again, Empedocles gives loose to his imagination by creating bold metaphors; he calls the flesh oаρкŵν XIтúv, and birds πτεροβάμονας κύμβας, Referring to his four elements, he thus personifies their attributes: Fiery Zeus, and Herè, source of vital breath, and Aidoneus, and Nestis with her tears.' At another time he speaks of earth, and ocean with his countless waves, and liquid air, the sun-god and

....

ether girdling round the universe in its | embrace.'

The passage too in which he describes the misery of earth rises to a sublime height. It may well have served as the original of Virgil's celebrated lines in the sixth Æneid :

I lifted up my voice, I wept and wailed, when I beheld the unfamiliar shore. A hideous shore on which dwell murder, envy, and the troop of baleful destinies, wasting corruption, and disease. Through Ate's meadow they go wandering up and down in gloom. There was the queen of darkness, and Heliope with her far-searching eyes, and bloody strife, and mild-eyed peace, beauty and ugliness, swiftness and sloth, and lovely truth, and insincerity with darkling brows. Birth too and death, slumber and wakefulness, motion and immobility, crowned majesty and squalid filth, discordant clamour and the voice of gods.'

We can understand by these passages how Empedocles not only was compared with Homer by Aristotle, but also with Thucydides and Eschylus by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who speaks of his austere harmony' (αὐστηρὴν ἁρμονίαν). The conciseness of his argumentative passages, the breadth of his treatment, and the dryness of his colouring, to quote the terms of painting, resemble the style of Thucydides, while his bold figures and gloomy grandeur are like those of Aschylus. Plutarch, in the treatise on the genius of Socrates, speaks of the style of Empedocles at large, both as regards his poems and his theories, as μála Beẞaxxevμén. This seems a contradiction to the austere harmony' of Dionysius. But there are passages which justify the title. This exordium, for instance, savours of prophetic fury:

'It stands decreed by fate, an ancient ordinance of the immortal gods, established from everlasting, ratified by ample oaths, that, when a spirit of that race, which has inherited the length of years divine, sinfully stains his limbs with blood, he must go forth to wander thrice ten thousand years from heaven, passing from birth to birth through every form of mortal mutability, changing the toilsome paths of life without repose, even as I now roam, exiled from God, an outcast on this world, the bondman of insensate strife.

Alas, ill-fated race of mortals, thrice accursed! from what dire struggles and what groans have ye been born! The air in its anger drives them to sea, and ocean spues them forth upon the solid land, earth tosses them into the flames of the untiring sun, he flings them back again into the whirlwinds of the air; from one to the other are they cast, and ali abhor them.'

And the following adjuration has a frantic energy, to modern readers almost laughable but for its indubitable gravity,

'Wretches, thrice wretches, keep your hands from beans!

or, again, with reference to the abomination of animal food:—

'The father drags along his dear son changed in form, and slays him, pouring prayers upon his head. But the son goes begging mercy from his maniac sire. The father heeds him not, but goads him on, and, having slaughtered him, prepares a cursed meal. In like manner sons take their fathers, and children their mothers, and tearing out the life devour the kindred flesh. Will ye not put an end to this accursed slaughter? Will ye not see that ye consume each other in blind ignorance of soul?' We do not wonder that the poems of Empedocles were pilfered by oracle-mongers in after ages.

But besides these passages, there are some of a milder beauty which deserve high praise for their admirable power of suggesting the picture which the poet wishes to convey. The following lines describe the golden age of old, to which Empedocles looked back with melancholy longing:

'There every animal was tame and familiar with men, both beasts and birds, and mutual love prevailed. Trees flourished with perpetual leaves and fruits, and ample crops adorned their boughs through all the year. Nor had these happy people any Ares or mad Uproar for their god; nor was their monarch Zeus, or Cronos, or Poseidon, but Queen Cypris. Her favour they besought with pious symbols and with images, and fragrant essences, and censers of pure myrrh, and frankincense, and with brown honey poured upon the ground. The altars did not reek with bullocks' gore.'

It may sound ridiculous to say so, yet Empedocles resembles Shelley in the quality of his imagination and in many of his utterances. The lines just quoted, the belief in a beneficent universal soul of nature, the hatred of animal food, the love of all things moving or growing on the face of earth, the sense of ancient guilt and present evil, are all, allowing for the difference of centuries, and race, and education, points by which the Greek and the English poets meet in a comTwo more quotations munity of nature. illustrative of the poetical genius of Empedocles may be quoted. In the first he describes the nature of God, invisible and omnipresent. In the second he asserts the existence of a universal law. They both are remarkable for simplicity and force and elevation of style :

'Blessed is the man who hath obtained the riches of the wisdom of God; wretched is he

who hath a false opinion about things divine.

'He (God) may not be approached, nor can we reach him with our eyes, or touch him with our hands. No human head is placed upon his

limbs, nor branching arms; he has no feet to carry him apace, nor other parts of man: but He is all pure mind, holy, and infinite, darting with swift thought through the universe from

end to end.'

'This law binds all alike, and none are free from it: the common ordinance which all obey prevails through the vast spaces of wide-ruling air and the illimitable fields of light in endless continuity,'

elements; earth, air, fire, and water refusing to retain the criminal, and tossing him about from one to the other without intermission. Thus, he might be a plant, a bird, a fish, a beast, or a human being in succession. But the transmigration did not depend upon mere chance. If the tortured spirit, environed, as he was, by the conflicting shapes and contradictory principles and baleful destinies which crowded earth-'the overvaulted cave,' the gloomy meadow of discord,' as Empedocles in his despair described our globe-could yet discover some faint. glimmering of the truth, seize and hold fast some portion of the heavenly clue, then he might hope to re-ascend to bliss. Instead of

The quotations which have served to illustrate the poetical genius of Empedocles, have also exhibited one aspect of his philosophy-that in which he was connected with the Pythagoreans. It is quite consistent with the whole temper of his intellect that he should have been attracted to the semi-abiding among birds, and other unclean Oriental mysticism which then was widely spread through Grecian Italy and Sicily. After the dissolution of the monastic commonwealth which Pythagoras had founded, it is probable that refugees imbued with his social and political theories scattered themselves over the adjacent cities, and from some of these men Empedocles may have imbibed in early youth the dreamlike doctrines of an ante-natal life, of future immortality, of past transgression and the need of expiation, of abstinence, of the bond of fellowship which bound man to his kindred sufferers upon the earth. It is even asserted in one legend that the philosopher of Agrigentum belonged to the Pythagorean Society, and was expelled from it for having been the first to divulge its secrets. In after life these theories were developed by Empedocles after his own fashion, and received a peculiar glow of poetic colouring from his genius. There is no need to suppose that he visited the East and learned the secrets of Gymnosophists. A few Pythagorean seeds sown in his fruitful soil sprang up and bore a hundred-fold. Referring to the exordium of his poem on Nature, and to the lines in which he describes the unapproachable Deity, we find that Empedocles believed in a pristine state of happiness, in which the 'Demons,' or 'gods, long of life, supreme in honour,' dwelt together enjoying a society of bliss. Yet this state was not perfect, for some of these immortals stained their hands with blood, and some spoke perjury, and so sin entered in and tainted heaven. After such offence the erring spirit, by the fateful, irrevocable, and perennial law of the divine commonwealth, had to relinquish his heavenly throne and wander thirty thousand seasons' from his comrades. In this period of exile he passed through all the changes of metempsychosis. According to this rigorous and gloomy conception of Empedocles, this change was caused by the hatred of the

beasts, and common plants, his soul passed
into the bodies of noble lions, and mystic
bay-trees, or became a bard, a prophet, a
ruler among men, and lastly rose again to
the enjoyment of undying bliss. Through-
out these wanderings death was impossible.
Empedocles laughed at the notion of birth
and death; he seems to have believed in a
fixed number of immortal souls, capable of
any transformation, but incapable of perish-
ing. So that when his spirits, falling earth-
ward, howled at the doleful aspect of the
hideous land, the very poignancy of their
grief consisted in that bitter thought of
Dante's, 'questi non hanno speranza di
morte '-in that thought which makes the
morte-in
Buddhist welcome annihilation.
been already hinted that, although the soul
by its forced exile lost not only happiness
but also knowledge, yet the one might be in
part retrieved, and the other toilsomely built
up again in some degree by patient observa-
tion, prayer, and magic rites. On this point
hinges the philosophy of Empedocles. It is
here that his mysticism and his science are
united into one system. In like manner
Plato's philosophy rests upon the doctrine
of Anamnesis, and is connected with the
vision of a past beatitude, the tradition of a
miserable fall, and the prospect of a possible
restoration. Empedocles, like Parmenides
and Xenophanes in their disquisitions on the
eternal Being, like Plato in his references
to the Supreme Idea, seems to have imagined
that the final Essence of the universe was
inapproachable, and to have drawn a broad
distinction between the rational and sensual
orders, between the World as cognizable by
pure intellect, and the world as known
through the medium of human Sense. The
lines of Empedocles upon God, which have
been already quoted, are similar to those of
Xenophanes: both philosophers assert the
existence of an unknown Deity pavilioned
in dense inscrutability, yet not the less to be

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