PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO of which less has been preserved Scholars not agree to which poem should be attached the many disjointed citations that survive; some, indeed, think that the two poems belonged to a single work Further pieces of the textual jigsaw were recovered when forty papyrus fragments were identiWed in the archives of the University of Strasbourg in 1994 As a poet, Empedocles was more Xuent than Parmenides, and also more versatile According to Aristotle, he wrote an epic on Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, and according to other traditions he was the author of several tragedies (D.L 57) Empedocles’ philosophy of nature can be regarded, from one point of view, as a synthesis of the thought of the Ionian philosophers As we have seen, each of them had singled out some one substance as the basic or dominant stuV of the universe: Thales had privileged water, Anaximenes air, Xenophanes earth, and Heraclitus Wre For Empedocles all four of these substances stood on equal terms as the fundamental ingredients, or ‘roots’ as he put it, of the universe These roots had always existed, he maintained, but they mingle with each other in various proportions in such a way as to produce the familiar furniture of the world and also the denizens of the heavens From these four sprang what was and is and ever shall: Trees, beasts, and human beings, males and females all, Birds of the air, and Wshes bred by water bright; The age-old gods as well, long worshipped in the height These four are all there is, each other interweaving And, intermixed, the world’s variety achieving (KRS 355) What Empedocles called ‘roots’ were called by Plato and later Greek thinkers stoicheia, a word earlier used to indicate the syllables of a word The Latin translation elementum, from which our ‘element’ is derived, compares the roots not to syllables, but to letters of the alphabet: an elementum is an LMNtum Empedocles’ quartet of elements was assigned a fundamental role in physics and chemistry by philosophers and scientists until the time of Boyle in the seventeenth century Indeed, it can be claimed that it is still with us, in altered form Empedocles thought of his elements as four diVerent kinds of matter; we think of solid, liquid, and gas as three states of matter Ice, water, and steam would be, for Empedocles, speciWc instances of earth, water, and air; for us they are three diVerent 21