The news this week, that thirty lines of the Physica (Φυσικά, On Nature) of Empedocles have been found in a papyrus held in Cairo, is exciting for everyone interested in ancient literature.
Not that most of us have ever heard of this Empedocles. He was a pre-Socratic philosopher who was active around 444 BC, invented the idea of the four elements – earth, fire, water, air – and threw himself into the volcano at Mount Etna in order to prove that he had become a god; an experiment which he did not survive. All his works are lost, but two of them, the Physica and the Katharmoi (On Ritual Purifications) are mentioned by Diogenes Laertius (book 8) as totalling 5,000 lines.
Here’s the opening of his Katharmoi:
Friends, who in the great town of the yellow Acragas dwell on the city’s heights, caring about good deeds, I greet you. You see me going about as a divine god, no longer a mortal, honoured amongst all, it seems, and wreathed in ribbons and verdant garlands. [Whenever] I arrive in prosperous towns I am revered by men and women. They follow me in their thousands, asking me where lies their road to advantage, some requesting oracles, while others have asked to hear a healing utterance for ailments of all kinds, long pierced by troublesome [pains].1
Some 200 quotations of his works are known. A long extract from book one of the Physica is preserved in Simplicius in the sixth century AD, a thousand years after it was composed, but the work must have perished soon afterwards. There is a report that Giovanni Aurispa had a copy of the Katharmoi in his library in Venice, but exciting reports of long-lost works in that period tend to have as their source Greek book-dealers intent on bait-and-switch sales of much less exciting books.
The story of the rediscovery is itself fascinating.
In 1904 the German archaeologist Otto Rubensohn bought a chunk of cartonnage – papyrus reused like paper mache for coffins etc – from a dealer in Cairo, which he described as follows:
A collar-shaped, stiff strip of papyrus serving as a support to (gilded) copper leaves; the whole object was designed as a wreath, probably a funerary wreath; and it had come quite possibly from a necropolis at Panopolis [Akhmim].
The thin copper leaves formed a funerary wreath attached to the front of a mummy, and the papyrus was its support. The leaves were removed, probably by Rubensohn, and then the whole thing collapsed into a mass of fragments.
These fifty-two fragments ended up under glass at Strasbourg in 1905, with reference P.Strasb.gr.Inv.1665-1666, and there they stayed until 1992. In that year or nearly so – the articles I have seen vary – Alain Martin identified them as 70+ lines of the Physica of Empedocles. The reason that he was able to do this was because Simplicius quotes a big chunk from book 1 of the Physica, and 20 lines of that was in this papyrus. In fact the papyrus revealed that the copy used by Simplicius was slightly corrupt.
The original roll was written, on one side only, at the end of the first century AD by a good clear scribe without punctuation or word division. The verso is blank. Note the letter Gamma before one line at the bottom of one column. This is a line number for stichiometry, meaning “300”, showing that the roll was written in columns of 30 hexameters, and this was the tenth column. 2
But this is not all. In 2021 Belgian papyrologist Nathan Carlig discovered a further fragment of the same roll, while cataloguing papyri at the Institut français d’archéologie orientale in Cairo. The papyrus has the reference P.Fouad inv. 218. The fragment measures 10.9 cm (about 4.25 inches) wide by 13.2 cm (just over 5 inches) high, and contains parts of around thirty lines.
More specifically, Dr C. tells us in a blog post that:
The right, left, and bottom of the papyrus are mutilated, so that the left column bears the end of thirteen verses, while the right column consists of the beginning of twenty.
and:
The recovered text introduces Empedocles’ theory of pores, describing how perception occurs when particles emitted by objects enter the sense organs through small holes corresponding to the particles form and size. We know from the surviving fragments and the testimony of Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and others that this theory was a fundamental part of Empedocles doctrine, with which he explained many natural phenomena, including magnetism and vision.
The papyrus was published early this year.3
Marvellous stuff really!
- David Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, CUP (1999), chapter 1. Extract online here.[↩]
- Publication: A. Martin and O. Primavesi, L’Empédocle de Strasbourg (P. Strasb. Gr. Inv. 1665–1666). Introduction, Édition et Commentaire. With an English Summary. Strasbourg, Berlin and New York, NY, (1999). Also includes translation. These details mainly from: N. van der Ben, “The Strasbourg Papyrus of Empedocles: Some Preliminary Remarks”, in: Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, 52 (1999), pp. 525-544. JSTOR. Also a useful Bryn Mawr review.[↩]
- Publication: Nathan Carlig, Alain Martin, Oliver Primavesi, L’Empédocle du Caire (P.Fouad inv. 218). Introduction, texte, commentaire. Brussels: Association Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth (2025). Series: Papyrologica Bruxellensia, 44. The press-release.[↩]