L’ontologia civica di Empedocle d’Agrigento

Abstract

This my new contribution – on the wake of my recent studies on the milesian school, on Xenophanes, on Heraclitus, on Pithagorics, on Eleatics and on Plato – aims to achieve three interesting historiographic objectives, neglected by the modern doctrine: a] to demonstrate – through close examination of the development of the Hellenic institutions – how, in the history of marginal Greece one must recognise an irrefutable feedback effect between the social context (colonization of Southern Italy and Sicily) and the cultural context (the writings of Empedocles); b] to analyze the evolution of the concept of dikhe in the organization of the empedoclean doctrine of kosmos; c] to show how Empedocles, against all form of stasis or tyrannical authoritarianism, defended the aristocratic ideal of harmony, embodied in the values of civic omonoia and logos, to the statement of an harmonious and united polis.