For not from the back do two arms[131] spring
p. 374.Nor feet nor active knees, nor hairy genitals.
But it was a sphere and everywhere alike.[132]
Such things [does] Love, and turns out the most beautiful form of the world as One from many; but Strife rends gradually from that One the principle of its arrangement, and again makes it [into] many. This is what Empedocles says of his own birth:—
Of whom I also am now a fugitive and an exile from the gods.[133]
That is, he calls the One divine, and says that the unity formerly existing in the One was rent asunder by Strife and came into being in these many things, existing according to Strife’s ordering. For, says he, Strife is the furious and troublous and unresting Demiurge of this cosmos, whose p. 375. [fashioner] Empedocles calls it. For this is the judgment and compulsion of the souls which Strife rends away from the One and fashions and works up, which process [Empedocles] describes somehow like this:—
Who having sinned swore falsely
And demons are allotted long-drawn out life.[134]
calling the long-lived souls “demons” because they are immortal and live through long ages.
For three myriad seasons they wandered from the blessed,[135]