The Playful Role of the Girl in Empedocles’ B100

Abstract

Abstract Empedocles’ B100 contains an analogy between a girl handling a clepsydra and respiration. This article argues that proposals to establish Love (Bollack 1965, Gheerbrant 2017) or Persephone (Rashed 2008) as the girl’s respiratory equivalent are rendered unlikely by differences between their respective causal roles. Rather than her gender, this article emphasises the importance of the girl’s age: Empedocles required a playful child to handle the clepsydra. This child’s play results in the extra phase of submerging the clepsydra while the upper vent is open, which Empedocles needed to form a parallel for the first static phase of respiration.