[68] 372 ff. Mull.; fr. 105: αἵματος ἐν πελάγεσσι . . . τῇ τε νόημα μάλιστα κυκλίσκεται ἀνθρώποισιν· αἷμα γὰρ ἀνθρώποις περικάρδιόν ἐστι νόημα.—The blood is the seat of τὸ φρονεῖν· ἐν τούτῳ γὰρ μάλιστα κεκρᾶσθαι τὰ στοιχεῖα, Thphr., Sens. 10, 23 f.
[69] A kind of συγγυμνασία τῶν αἰσθήσεων as the physician Asklepiades defines the idea of the ψυχή (Dox. 378a, 7).—It resembles what Arist. calls the πρῶτον αἰσθητήριον.—This function which Emped. calls φρονεῖν would probably be the ἑνοποιοῦν of the perceptions which Aristot. found wanting in Emp. (An. 409b, 30 ff.; 410a, 1–10; b, 10).
[70] τὸ νοεῖν is σωματικὸν ὥσπερ τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι, Arist., An. 427a, 26.
[71] Arist., Metaph. 1009b, 17 ff.
[72] 298 Mull.; fr. 110, 10: πάντα γὰρ ἴσθι φρόνησιν ἔχειν καὶ νώματος αἷσαν. The πάντα must be understood quite literally; for it is the [403] elements in which the powers of perception inhere (ἕκαστον τῶν στοιχείων ψυχὴν εἶναι is the opinion attributed to Emped. by Arist., An. 404b, 12). But elements are present in the mixture of all things, and thus stones, etc., have φρόνησις and a “portion of mind” in them (though the statement that it is αἵμα that first produces φρόνησις will not square with this: Thphr., Sens. 23). Emped. attributed complete sensation and perception to plants, and even gave them νοῦς and γνῶσις (without blood?): [Arist.] Plant. 815a, 16 ff.; b, 16 f. That is why they, too, are capable of harbouring fallen daimones.
[73] Emped. himself does not use the word ψυχή at all in the fragments that have been preserved to us; and it is hardly probable that he himself would have used the term of the psychical faculties of the body even if he regarded these as gathered together to a substantive unity. Later authorities, on the other hand, in their accounts of the doctrine of Emped. give the name of ψυχή precisely to these “somatic” intellectual faculties; thus Arist., An. 404b, 9 ff.; 409b, 23 ff.: αἷμα φησιν εἶναι τὴν ψυχήν, Gal., Hipp. et Pla. 2 = v, 283 K.; cf. Cic., TD. i, 19; Tert., An. 5.
[74] 113–19 Mull.; frr. 11, 15, do not (as Plu., adv. Col. 12, p. 1113 D, understood them) teach the pre-existence and persistence after death of the psychic powers within the world of the elements, but merely speak of the indestructibility of the elements that are the component parts of the human body, even when the latter has suffered dissolution.
[75] ἄτης λειμών, fr. 121, 4 (21 Mull.; cf. 16) is the name given by Empedokles to the earth; and not to Hades (as has been supposed), of which—as an intermediate place of purgation between two births—there is nowhere any mention in his verses. That the ἀτερπὴς χῶρος (fr. 121, 1) to which Emped. is cast down, the realm of Φόνος κτλ. (fr. 121) and the Ἄτης λειμών, all refer to the earth, ὁ ἔγγειος τόπος, τὰ περὶ γῆν, is expressly stated by Themistios, Or. 13, and Hierocl. in C. Aur. 24 (fr. 121), p. 470 Mull. [FPG. i]; Synes. also implies it (Ep. 147, p. 283 C; Prov. i, 89 D); the same is distinctly implied for fr. 121, 4, and by Jul., Or. vii, 226 B; Philo, ii, p. 638 M.—Procl., in Crat., p. 103 Boiss., connects fr. 121, 3, αὐχμηραί τε νόσοι καὶ σήψιες ἔργα τε ῥευστά immediately with fr. 121, 2, and both lines acc. to him apply to τὰ ὑπὸ τὴν σελήνην; i.e. not to any kind of underworld but to the region of the earth (cf. Emp. ap. Hippol., RH. i, 4; Vors. 210, 27; Dox. 559). The idea that Hades is being spoken of in these lines is a view peculiar to moderns who have misunderstood the poet and set aside the clear testimony of Themistios and the rest. Maass, Orpheus, 113, speaks as though the interpretation in favour of Hades rested upon a tradition which I “contradicted”. On the contrary, that interpretation is itself contradicted by definite tradition and by common sense (for Emp. falls from Heaven to earth and not, please God, to Hades!). The view is quite baseless (though Maass himself finds in the ἔργα ῥευστά of fr. 121 [20 M.]—the inconstant, transitory works of men upon earth—a support for his Hades-view: these “fluid works” or things are, he thinks, nothing else but the stream of filth, the σκὼρ ἀείνων, in Hades of which pious invention rumoured: certainly an ingenious interpretation). Emp. is, in fact, the first to regard this earthly sojourning as the real Hell—the ἀσυνήθης, ἀτερπὴς χῶρος (fr. 118, 121, 1, the latter a parodying reminiscence of λ 94)—an ἄντρον ὑπόστεγον (fr. 120) filled with all the plagues and terrors of the original Hades (121). Stoics and Epicureans (see [below]) took up the idea after him and elaborated it in detail. The daimones that are shut up in this life here below—a ζωὴ ἄβιος (fr. 2, 3)—are as if dead: [404] frr. 125 (?), 35, 14. The Orphic idea of the σῶμα—σῆμα (see above, [p. 345]) was thus thoroughly and energetically carried out. (Macr., in S. Scip. 1, 10, 9 ff., attributed the idea that the inferi are nothing else but the material world of earth to the old theologi (§ 17) who, he says, lived before the development of a philosophic science of nature.)
[76] 3 Mull.; fr. 115, 3: εὖτέ τις (τῶν δαιμόνων) ἀμπλακίῃσι φόνῳ φίλα γυῖα μιηνῃ. He means βρῶσις σαρκῶν καὶ ἀλληλοφαγία as Plu. paraphrases it, Es. Carn. 1, p. 996 B (for this must always imply acc. to Emp. the “murder” of a spirit of the same race: fr. 136). Even for God it is a crime to taste of a meat (“blood”)-offering and, in fact, there were only bloodless offerings made in the Golden Age (which was described by Emp. not in the Φυσικά—the principle of which work denied that there had ever been such a period—but in some other poem in which he left his philosophic doctrine out of account; perhaps the Καθαρμοί): 420 ff. M; fr. 128, 3 ff.
[77] fr. 115, 4. The earth then becomes the place of their banishment and punishment for gods that have broken their oath. This is a version of the impressive picture in Hes., Th. 793 ff. Dei peierantes were punished for nine years (cf. Hes., Th. 801) in Tartaros: Orpheus (not Lucan in his “Orpheus”) ap. Serv., A. vi, 565. (To this also alludes the poet from whose elegiac verses came the frag. ap. Serv., A. vi, 324: τοῦ [sc. Στυγὸς ὕδατος] στυγνὸν πῶμα καὶ ἀθανάτῳ: this is probably how the words should be read.) So that instead of the “underworld” or Tartaros, the world is for Emp. the worst place of sorrows. From Emp. is derived the conception that the realm of the inferi is our world, that inhabited by men, and that there is no other, nor any need of another ᾅδης—a conception often alluded to and improved upon by Stoic and other semi-philosophers (esp. clear in Serv., A. vi, 127, often only in allegorical sense: Lucr. iii, 978 ff. [See also Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, p. 107.]).