In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews The Proem of Empedocles' Peri Physios. Towards a New Edition o] All the Fragments. Thirty-one Fragments. Ed. by 1'4. van der Ben. (Amsterdam: B. R. Grfiner by Publishers , 1975. Pp. 230. Paper) For more than a century students of ancient philosophy have marveled at the distance between Empedocles' scientific poem, the Peri Physios, and the mystical doctrine of his Katharmoi. The marvel is of their own making, however, for in dividing the surviving fragments between the two poems they assumed just that distance. Recent scholarship has narrowed the gap between the poems as traditionally reconstituted, and a full scale reassessment of the evidence for assigning the fragments is now in order. That is just what van der Ben gives us in his edition of the proem of the Peri Physios. Working strictly from ancient testimony and internal evidence, van der Ben has come to the conclusion that the bulk of what Diels assigned to the Katharmoi is more likely to belong to the Peri Physios, specifically, to the proem of that work. In this critical edition he offers us a proem of thirty-one fragments (text and translation) with a critical appartus, a set of critical notes, and an introduction defending his assignment of the fragments. Since this is the beginning of what is to be an edition of all the fragments, we must ask whether, in the light of Bollack's recent edition, 1 there is still a need for such a work. My answer is that there is. Bollack's book is a heady stimulus to the imagination. It is, as Walter Burkert wrote in his 1972 review in Gnomon, "ein sehr persShnlicher, faszinierender und provozierender Entwurf, vibrierend yon Scharfsinn und Engagement." Surprisingly , Bollack does not question Diels's division of fragments between the two poems. If we may judge from the present sample, van der Ben's edition will meet a need not satisfied by Bollack's, for van der Ben combines the virtue of painstaking attention to the evidence with an attitude of respectful scepticism to scholarly authority. He parts with traditional Empedocles scholarship by renouncing the search for "the One Divine Intuition about Empedocles from which the solution of all of the problems might be deduced " (p. 65). He makes no attempt to reconstruct systematically the philosophy of Empedocles, but draws only those conclusions that are strictly warranted by the evidence. His approach is a much needed corrective to recent work on the subject. He gives us a critical apparatus that is accurate and more complete than Bollack's. His choice among manuscript readings is guided by principles of textual criticism, and never by inferences from what one fragment says to what ought to be said in another. The critical notes will be useful to Empedocles scholars of any persuasion, for van der Ben goes beyond merely supporting his readings and renderings. There is here a wealth of ancient parallels and references to traditional scholarship. He does not take adequate notice of contemporary scholarship, however. Why, for example, is there no reference to Bollock's widely accepted translation of plateos.., horkou in B30, 3 as "d'une large enceinte"?2 And sometimes , though rarely, van der Ben states conclusions more strongly than he should. For example, he says that the discovery of a reference to Book II of the Katharmoi confirms the existence of the disputed third book of the Peri Physios (p. 15). But that discovery supports his conclusion only on the plausible conjecture that the Katharmoi was the shorter poem. On the whole, van der Ben excels in respect for the evidence, so much so that he is 1 Jean Bollack, Emp~docle. II: Les Origines. ~dition et traduction des fragments et des t6moignages. III: Les Origines. Commentaire (Paris: Ed. Minuit, 1969). 2 "Styx et serments," Revue des Etudes Grecques, 71 (1958), 1-35. Cf. Empddocle, II, p. 56. [477] 478 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY reluctant to use evidence imaginatively. What has come down to us is, to be sure, meager, so we must treat it with the greatest respect. But because it is meager, we have no choice but to use imagination. Interpreters of the pre-Socratics must see...

pdf

Share