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But come, if the form of my previous arguments was in any way incomplete, take note of the witness of these to what I have said before: the sun, white[-hot] to behold and hot throughout, heavenly bodies drenched in heat and shining light, rain everywhere dark and chill; and from the earth issue forth things firmly rooted and solid. Under anger, they have different forms and are all separate; but under affection, they come together and desire one another. From these come all the things that were and are and will be— trees spring up, and men and women, and [land] animals, and birds, and water-nourished fish, and the long-lived gods, highest in honor. For these [elements] alone are real; and as they run through one another, they take on different forms; for their intermingling changes them. Although Hölderlin relied mainly on Diogenes Laërtius’s account of Empedocles ’ life and thought, without benefit of critical scholarship,1 his dramatization is both erudite and philosophically insightful. Given his own strongly held democratic (or, in the terminology of his time, “republican”) and egalitarian political ideals (notably as they inspired the French Revolution), he shows himself particularly impressed by the biographical tradition concerning Empedocles ’ refusal of the kingship of Akragas offered to him, given that he was a champion of freedom and adverse to sovereignty of any kind, and by the story, passed from Neanthes to Diogenes Laërtius, that when tyranny was about to take hold of the city, Empedocles persuaded the citizens to set aside their controversies so as to be able to espouse a democratic form of government.2 Hölderlin draws on this narrative tradition in the final testament that he puts into the 55 FOUR Between Hölderlin’s Empedocles and Empedocles of Akragas mouth of Empedocles in the First Version. He also incorporates other details from the biographical tradition, as preserved by Diogenes Laërtius, ranging from the confusion, prevalent in antiquity, between Empedocles himself and his grandfather, purportedly of the same name, who won an Olympic horse race in 496 b.c.e. (Hölderlin’s Delia ascribes this victory to Empedocles the philosopher ), on to his healing of a desperately ill woman named Pantheia (Panthea). However, what is for Hölderlin the key element of that tradition, Empedocles’ supposed leap into Mt. Aetna’s crater, is today considered apocryphal. Even Diogenes Laërtius mentions it only as one of several different narratives concerning Empedocles’ death. Contemporary scholarship traces the story to Heraclides Ponticus and rejects it, not only on scholarly grounds, but also on the basis of geographical near-impossibility.3 Hölderlin, however, did not just draw on biography, but was deeply inspired by Empedocles’ thought; and it is also striking that elements of Empedoclean diction still resonate in his late hymn Andenken, where the penultimate verse, “Und die Lieb’ auch heftet fleissig die Augen” (“And love also diligently fixes its eyes”) echoes Empedocles’ Fragment 86: jEx w|n o[mmat j ejphvxen ajteivrea di ~ j j Aϕrodivth Out of these [elements] divine Aphrodite fashioned untiring eyes.4 With respect to Hölderlin’s tragic figure of Empedocles, however, the two main interconnections between his own thought and that of the pre-Socratic philosopher concern the ontological primacy and sacredness of the elements, together with the two opposed cosmic forces of Love and Strife that agitate them, and the fall, suffering, and redemption of the spirit or daimo\n consequent upon a transgression . These themes are crucial, respectively, to Empedocles’ two philosophical poems, On Nature (Peri; fuvsew~) and Purifications (Kaqarmoiv); and they will need to be traced out here for the sake of gaining a comparative perspective. Empedocles addresses “On Nature” to his disciple Pausanias, son of Anchites, whom he exhorts to devote, not only his detached intellect, but also all his senses to attaining the full range of understanding that the mind of a mortal can aspire to. The pithy statement in Fragment 17 that “learning will increase your understanding” certainly remains a timeless instructional motto. Understanding, however, is not just an end in itself for Empedocles, but rather, in On Nature, it is also the pathway to acquiring beneficient powers . In Fragment 111, Pausanias is promised not only the ability to control the climate as well as knowledge of medicines to counteract illnesses and the ravages of old age, but even the ability to “bring out of Hades a dead man restored to strength.” As Jean...

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