Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

Nothing is more remarkable about Empedocles than his versatility and comprehensiveness. Other men of his age were as nobly born, as great in philosophic power, as distinguished for the part they bore in politics, as celebrated for poetic genius, as versed in mystic lore, in medicine, and in magic arts. But Parmenides, Pythagoras, Pausanias, and Epimenides could claim honor in but one, or two at most, of these departments. Empedocles united all, and that too, if we may judge by the temper of his genius and the few legends handed down to us about his life, in no ordinary degree. He seems to have possessed a warmth and richness of nature which inclined him to mysticism and poetry, and gave a tone of peculiar solemnity to everything he did or thought or said. At the same time, he was attracted by the acuteness of his intellect to the metaphysical inquiries which were agitating the western colonies of Greece, while his rare powers of observation enabled him to make discoveries in the then almost unexplored region of natural science. The age in which he lived had not yet thrown off the form of poetry in philosophical composition. Even Parmenides had committed his austere theories to hexameter verse. Therefore, the sage of Agrigentum was easily led to concentrate his splendid powers on the production of one great work, and made himself a poet among philosophers, and a philosopher among poets, without thereby impairing his claims to rank highly both as a poet and also as a thinker among the most distinguished men of Greece. But Empedocles had not only deeply studied metaphysics, nature, and the arts of verse; whatever was mysterious in the world around him, in the guesses of past ages, and in the forebodings of his own heart, possessed a powerful attraction for the man who thought himself inspired of God. Having embraced the Pythagorean theories, he maintained the fallen state of men, and implored his fellow-creatures to purge away the guilt by which they had been disinherited and exiled from the joys of heaven. Thus he appeared before his countrymen not only as a poet and philosopher, but also as a priest and purifier. Born of a wealthy and illustrious house, he did not expend his substance merely on horse-racing and chariots, by which means of display his ancestors had gained a princely fame in Sicily; but, not less proud than they had been, he shod himself with golden sandals, set the laurel crown upon his head, and, trailing robes of Tyrian purple through the streets of Agrigentum, went attended by a crowd of serving-men and reverent admirers. He claimed to be a favorite of Phœbus, and rose at length to the pretension of divinity. His own words show this, gravely spoken, with no vain assumption, but with a certainty of honor well deserved:

"Friends who dwell in the great city hard by the yellow stream of Acragas, who live on the Acropolis, intent on honorable cares, harbors revered of strangers, ignorant of what is vile, welcome; but I appear before you an immortal god, having overpassed the limits of mortality, and walk with honor among all, as is my due, crowned with long fillets and luxuriant garlands. No sooner do I enter their proud prosperous cities than men and women pay me reverence, who follow me in thousands, asking the way to profit, some desiring oracles, and others racked by long and cruel torments, hanging on my lips to hear the spells that pacify disease of every kind."

We can hardly wonder that some of the fellow-citizens of Empedocles were jealous of his pretensions, and regarded him with suspicious envy and dislike, when we read such lines of lofty self-exaltation. Indeed, it is difficult for men of the nineteenth century to understand how a great and wise philosopher could lay claim to divine honors in his own lifetime. This arrogance we have been accustomed to associate with the names of a Caligula and a Claudius. Yet when we consider the circumstances in which Empedocles was placed, and the nature of his theories, our astonishment diminishes. The line of demarcation between this world and the supernatural was then but vague and undetermined. Popular theology abounded in legends of gods who had held familiar intercourse with men, and of men who had been raised by prowess or wisdom to divinity. The pedigrees of all distinguished families ended in a god at no great distance. Nor was it then a mere figure of speech when bards and priests claimed special revelations from Apollo, or physicians styled themselves the children of Asclepius. Heaven lay around the first Greeks in their infancy of art and science; it was long before the vision died away and faded into the sober daylight of Aristotelian philosophy. Thus when Empedocles proclaimed himself a god, he only stretched beyond the usual limit a most common pretension of all men learned in arts and sciences. His own speculations gave him further warrant for the assumption of the style of deity; for he held the belief that all living souls had once been dæmons or divine spirits, who had lost their heavenly birthright for some crime of impurity or violence, and yet were able to restore themselves to pristine splendor by the rigorous exercise of abstinence and expiatory rites. These rites he thought he had discovered. He had prayed and fasted; he had held communion with Phœbus the purifier, and received the special favor of that god, by being made a master in the arts of song and magic and healing and priestcraft. Was he not, therefore, justified in saying that he had won again his rights divine, and transformed himself into a god on earth? His own words tell the history of his fall:

"Woe to me that I did not fall a prey to death before I took the cursed food within my lips!... From what glory, from what immeasurable bliss, have I now sunk to roam with mortals on this earth?"

Again, he says:

"For I have been in by-gone times a youth, a maiden, and a flowering shrub, a bird, yea, and a fish that swims in silence the deep sea."

From this degraded state the spirit gradually emerges. Of the noblest souls he says:

"Among beasts they become lions dwelling in caverns of the earth upon the hills, and laurels among leafy trees, ... and at last prophets and bards and physicians and chiefs among the men of earth, from whence they rise to be gods supreme in honor, ... sitting at banquets with immortal comrades, in their feasts unvisited by human cares, beyond the reach of fate and wearing age."

Empedocles, by dint of pondering on nature, by long penance, by the illumination of his intellect and the coercion of his senses, had been raised before the natural term of life to that high honor, and been made the fellow of immortal gods. His language upon this topic is one of the points in which we can trace an indistinct resemblance between him and some of the Indian mystics. There is, however, no reason to suppose that Asiatic thought had any marked or direct influence on Greek philosophy. It is better to refer such similarities to the working of the same tendencies in the Greek and Hindoo minds.