This article attempts to shed more light on a problem addressed in a previous work by the same authors, namely the nature of Empedocles’ Sphairos, which is taken for a structured whole and not – according to the usual interpretation – as an amorphous mixture. This article does not concentrate on the fragments of Empedocles himself, but focuses on the further reception of the Sphairos by ancient Greek writers. First, the paper attempts to show that the interpretation prevalent today is actually due to Aristotle’s equation of the Sphairos with his concept of ‘underlying matter’ conceived as an indeterminate substratum. The only ancient author who seems to hold the interpretation of the Sphere as an amorphous mixture is, however, John Philoponus, and, moreover, only in some of his commentaries on Aristotle. Philoponus’ notion of the Sphairos was then adopted by Friedrich Wilhelm Sturz, author of the first substantial modern study on Empedocles, published in 1805. The current article then examines the Neoplatonic explanation of the Sphairos, in which it is regularly equated with the intelligible word of the Forms. Although its transcendence is clearly at odds with the Empedocles’ original intentions, this interpretative approach assumes that the Sphairos is as clearly structured as the Forms are.
This article presents further discussion of a problem addressed in a previous study, namely the nature of Empedocles’ Sphairos, which is taken to be a structured whole and not – as it is usually interpreted – an amorphous mixture. Instead of concentrating on the fragments of Empedocles himself, a previous article launched a thorough study of the further reception of the Sphairos by later ancient Greek writers (Aristotle and the Neoplatonists). This time we turn our attention to Plato, where we can find Empedoclean echoes in the Timaeus and Politicus. In both cases, the Sphairos is equated with the sensible world, which is, again, a structured whole. Common motifs include the world conceived as a kind of superorganism (living being), the idea of a cosmic cycle, and the concept of the blessed life of humankind in the Golden Age.
This article presents further discussion of a problem addressed in a previous work, namely the nature of Empedocles’ Sphairos, which is taken by us to be a structured whole and not – as it seems to be usually interpreted – an amorphous mixture. In the previous two articles we did not concentrate on the fragments of Empedocles himself, but initiated a thorough study of the further reception of the Sphairos by later ancient Greek writers (Aristotle and the Neoplatonists). Then we turned our attention to Plato, where we can fi nd Empedoclean echoes in the Timaeus and Statesman. This time we are investigating Empedocles’zoogony, that is, his account of the origin of life. There are strong parallels between Empedocles’ fragments and Plato’s Symposium. We have proposed a new reconstruction of the transformations of living beings to fi t better with our interpretation of Sphairos and Empedocles’ cosmic cycle. The article offers a metapoetic reading of Herondas’ second Mimiamb, in which Battaros should be identifi ed with Callimachus, Thales with Apollonius of Rhodes and Myrtale with the poetic production of Callimachus himself. According to this approach, the real aim of the mimiamb could be the ironic description of Callimachus (portrayed as a greedy brothel-keeper) accusing Apollonius of stealing his poems: the Koan jury (probably the poets around Philetas) will have to judge, in fact, a case of plagiarism.
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