SOURCE: Lombardo, Stanley. “Empedocles: Introduction.” In Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation, pp. 23-30. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1982.

In the following excerpt, Lombardo provides an overview of Empedocles's subject matter in his poetry.

Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except for their meter. If the one is to be called a poet, the other should be called a natural philosopher rather than a poet.

(Aristotle, Poetics 1447)

Aristotle is quibbling, dissembling, or both. In a less celebrated passage (On Poets, fr. 70) he gives credit to Empedocles' sense of metaphor, powerful phrasing, and poetic technique in general. In any case, philosophical poetry was, then as now, a major form; and Empedocles' texts would be recognized as poetry—by the sheer energy of his language if nothing else—whether they were in meter or not. That they have not been so recognized by our literary generation is...