On Nature

Empedocles of Acragas in Sicily composed two hexameter poems, On Nature and Purifications, surviving today in substantial fragments including a set recovered on papyrus in 1990s Egypt, that together present a cosmology of four eternal root elements combined and separated by the opposing cosmic forces of Love and Strife in an endlessly repeating cycle, alongside a doctrine of the soul's transmigration through many lives as punishment for ancient bloodguilt. His four-element theory, answering Parmenides's argument against genuine change by making change a matter of rearranging eternal, unchanging elements rather than true coming-to-be or passing-away, dominated Western physical theory for two thousand years until it was displaced by early modern chemistry. Ancient tradition also remembers Empedocles as a wonder-working healer, prophet, and, in one famous story, a man who leapt into the volcano of Mount Etna to prove his own divinity.