Empedocles, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
I taught one doctrine. The disciple who learns the roots learns to abstain from flesh; the teaching that articulates the cosmic cycle articulates the fall of the daimon; Pausanias hears about the Sphairos and about the purifications in the same poem from the same teacher. The question whether what I wrote was one work or two works in the modern editor's sense — whether Peri Phuseos and Katharmoi were separate poems or one poem under two titles or one poem the doxographic tradition eventually catalogued under two titles — is a question I do not pose in those terms.
I composed a continuous didactic teaching. Later authors who cite from it report what they cite under whatever title suited them; modern editors who reconstruct from those citations have to choose where each fragment goes. The choice is theirs, not mine. The unity of the teaching is not in question for me; the editorial bookkeeping is a question of philology.1234
All that all purificatory material was in a poem of that name and that its content must have been radically different from that of the physical poem will one conclude immediately from these passages that they do not belong in the physical poem. And for these assumptions there is no evidence whatsoever. 28 15/111 31-32.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 14
It is almost certainly not genuine; if it is, its contents are nevertheless completely unknown. More likely it is an early prose paraphrase of the medical work in poetry which is also attributed to Empedocles.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 9
But the important point is the strength of the case for there having been only one poem. In support of that general position, we may also point to several cases where the way in which our sources for the fragments cite Empedocles' words can best be accounted for on the hypothesis of one poem.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 15
This view too makes Empedocles' fragments a thematically unified set, which is what matters. But I remain unconvinced by Sedley's detailed interpretation, wondering in particular about the historical soundness of the distinction between doctrinal and non-doctrinal poems, and about his attempt (272-73) to interpret in a 'non-doctrinal' way the apparently biological fragments attributed to that poem.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 16
The single-work hypothesis is the modern scholarly consensus after the Strasbourg papyrus (1999). Catherine Osborne (1987) and Brad Inwood (1992, revised 2001) already defended the single-work reading before the papyrus. Trépanier's Empedocles: An Interpretation (2004) Ch. I is the most sustained modern defense. The Strasbourg papyrus's ensemble d — which interweaves daimon-material with physical-cosmogonic material in a single continuous passage — is treated by most scholars as decisive against the strict two-works partition. Residual defenders of distinguishability: David Sedley (1998) on the theos/daimon incompatibility argument; Denis O'Brien on the older positivist textual evidence; van der Ben (1975) on the placement of B 115. The Diels-Kranz two-works partition that dominated twentieth-century scholarship is now treated as the cost of nineteenth- century positivist editing rather than as a finding about Empedocles' own practice. Jaeger's "philosophical centaur" framing — the assumption that the physics and the religion are systematically incompatible and require a developmental hypothesis to explain their coexistence — is now widely rejected.