The Death of Empedocles

Abstract

Empedocles' jump into Etna has fascinated both scholars and poets from ancient until modern times. ** Diogenes Laertius gave two versions of the jump; Matthew Arnold made it the subject of his long dramatic poem, Empedocles on Etna. The more one probes into the story, the more fascinating it is, as it becomes ever more clear that Empedocles was doomed to die in this particular manner. Not that he actually jumped into the volcano; rather, the manner of his death was determined by his biographers, by historians and compilers and, finally, by Empedocles himself. Empedocles' own works provided the ultimate source for those who wrote about him, and the way in which his philosophy was transformed into biography reveals more about ancient biographers, such as Diogenes Laertius, than it does about Empedocles. There was a tendency in the ancient world to approach any given text as biographical.1 Homer's life was pieced together from the Iliad and Odyssey; Aeschylus was presumed to have fought at Salamis because he describes that battle. Nearly all the biographical data that have come down to us from the ancient critics and historians about the lives of the poets were taken from their own poetry. The same case can be made for the lives of the philosophers. The legend of Empedocles neatly demonstrates this ancient tendency towards a biographical reading. A large enough body of Empedocles' own work is still extant, so that many of the legends and events about his life can be traced back to their original source. Since Empedocles was such a popular figure for the bi-