Empedocles, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
I address the friends from Acragas as one who walks among them — theos ambrotos, an immortal god, no longer mortal — honored, as is fitting. The claim is the literal claim B 112 makes. It is also the claim B 115 stands in tension with: there I speak as the daimon exiled for the crime of bloodshed, fugitive from the gods, wanderer through thirty thousand seasons.
I do not collapse the tension. There is one reading on which B 112 names the daimon at the completed apex of its purification cycle — the divine state regained after the long exile — and B 115 narrates the fall from which that return was made; on this reading the theos of B 112 and the daimon of B 115 are stages of one cycle, and the speaker of B 112 is the speaker of B 115 at a later moment.1
There is another reading on which the textual tension is real and not to be resolved by sequencing — theos and daimon are different kinds, and the same speaker cannot consistently claim both. I do not force the question. I speak from B 112 when I address the Acragantines; I speak from B 115 when I narrate the long exile; I let the two passages stand in the tension the surviving fragments preserve.234
If the former, then the blessed ones from whom the daimon is exiled will be the divine elements as blended perfectly in the sphere. If the latter, then they will be long-lived gods who rule in a happier period of the present world cycle. 35/30.3, I am convinced that the exile described here is an exile from the sphere, that is, that 11/115 deals with the primeval incarnation of a daimon. Lines 7ff.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 61
The most familiar instance of this is in the Odyssey, 6.84, where it is said that the 'other handmaidens' went together with princess Nausicaa; 'other' simply means 'in addition to Nausicaa.' This is probably the sense of 'other' in this passage; if so, it does not follow that the person in question is immortal. 11/115.5. 15/111 The other passage is 1/112.4 (Oebs a^fipoTos, OVKCTL OVIJTOS).The Poem of Empedocles, p. 58
The most plausible theory so far is that of O'Brien (who follows Cornford; see note 10, 325ff., in Empedocles' Cosmic Cycle), who suggests that it is a fragment of love; but for this there is no evidence, and it is clear that O'Brien's view reflects a belief that the daimon is immortal. // it is to be immortal, this is the best interpretation. 134 Note Aristotle's remarks in CTXT-13a.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 60
But <each> boasts of having seen > the whole. > In this way, these things are neither seen nor heard by men nor grasped with the understanding But you, then, since you have stepped aside here, 10 you will learn. Mortal cunning has certainly gone no further. 9/3 But gods! turn aside their madness from my tongue and channel a pure stream from holy mouths.The Poem of Empedocles, pp. 215–219
The B 112 / B 115 relation is one of the central interpretive cruxes of post-Strasbourg Empedoclean scholarship. David Sedley (1998, Ch. 1) argues that the theos/daimon distinction is real and that the same speaker cannot consistently claim both states, using the incompatibility to defend a residual two-works hypothesis (B 112 belongs to the Katharmoi; B 115 belongs to the Peri Phuseos). Trépanier (2004 Ch. III) and the post-papyrus mainstream argue the opposite: the theos of B 112 names the daimon at the completed apex of its purification, and the two fragments belong to the same poem and the same teaching. The Strasbourg papyrus shows daimon-material and physical-cosmogonic material interwoven in a single passage (ensemble d), strengthening the case for one teaching but leaving the specific theos/daimon question open. Kingsley reads the divinity claim as literal and continuous with archaic Greek shamanic-magical practice; most other readers treat the claim as religious in substance but mediated by the cycle of fall-and-return.