Elemental Change in Empedocles

Abstract This essay argues that Empedocles envisaged the elemental “roots” fire, water, earth, and air as having their own life cycles and undergoing their own transformations like virtually everything else in his system except Love and Strife. Empedocles conceives of the elements’ destruction and generation in terms of their losing and recovering their distinctive qualitative identities as they intermingle through Love’s agency and grow apart through Strife’s. This result makes it possible to understand the crucial verses Physika I.234–36 as Empedocles’ general description of the dual processes involved in the generation and destruction of all specimen compounds.