"It stands decreed by fate, an ancient ordinance of the immortal gods, established from everlasting, ratified by ample oaths, that, when a spirit of that race, which has inherited the length of years divine, sinfully stains his limbs with blood, he must go forth to wander thrice ten thousand years from heaven, passing from birth to birth through every form of mortal mutability, changing the toilsome paths of life without repose, even as I now roam, exiled from God, an outcast on this world, the bondman of insensate strife.
"Alas, ill-fated race of mortals, thrice accursed! from what dire struggles and what groans have ye been born! The air in its anger drives them to the sea, and ocean spues them forth upon the solid land, earth tosses them into the flames of the untiring sun, he flings them back again into the whirlwinds of the air; from one to the other are they cast, and all abhor them."
And the following adjuration has a frantic energy, to modern readers almost laughable but for its indubitable gravity:
Wretches, thrice wretches, keep your hands from beans!
or, again, with reference to the abomination of animal food:
"The father drags along his dear son changed in form, and slays him, pouring prayers upon his head. But the son goes begging mercy from his maniac sire. The father heeds him not, but goads him on, and, having slaughtered him, prepares a cursed meal. In like manner sons take their fathers, and children their mothers, and tearing out the life devour the kindred flesh. Will ye not put an end to this accursed slaughter? Will ye not see that ye consume each other in blind ignorance of soul?"
It is not strange that the poems of Empedocles were pilfered by oracle-mongers in after-ages.
Besides these passages, there are some of a milder beauty which deserve high praise for their admirable power of suggesting the picture that the poet wishes to convey. The following lines describe the golden age of old, to which Empedocles looked back with melancholy longing:
"There every animal was tame and familiar with men, both beasts and birds, and mutual love prevailed. Trees flourished with perpetual leaves and fruits, and ample crops adorned their boughs through all the year. Nor had these happy people any Ares or mad Uproar for their god; nor was their monarch Zeus, or Kronos, or Poseidon, but Queen Cypris. Her favor they besought with pious symbols and with images, and fragrant essences, and censers of pure myrrh, and frankincense, and with brown honey poured upon the ground. The altars did not reek with bullocks' gore."
It may sound ridiculous to say so, yet Empedocles resembles Shelley in the quality of his imagination and in many of his utterances. The lines just quoted, the belief in a beneficent universal soul of nature, the hatred of animal food, the love of all things moving or growing on the face of earth, the sense of ancient misery and present evil, are all, allowing for the difference of centuries and race and education, points by which the Greek and the English poets meet in a community of nature. Two more passages illustrative of the poetical genius of Empedocles may be quoted. In the first he describes the nature of God, invisible and omnipresent. In the second he asserts the existence of a universal law. They are both remarkable for simplicity and force, and elevation of style: