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Updated: June 4, 2025
Empedocles regarded the four elements, fire, air, earth and water, as "the roots of all things," and this became the corner stone in the humoral pathology of Hippocrates. For more than two thousand years these views prevailed.
They are to the Greek plays as gaslight to sunlight. But in estimating their poetic value it is fair to remember that the Roman ideas of art were neither so accurate nor so profound as ours. The deep analysis of Aristotle, which grouped all poets who wrote on a theme under the title rhetorical, and refused to Empedocles the name of poet at all, would not have been appreciated by the Romans.
In 1849 he had published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems. He had done the same with Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems in 1852. The best contents of these two volumes were combined in Poems, 1853, and to this book he gave a Preface, which was his first essay in Literary Criticism.
So I have come to help you out of your difficulty; you are distressed, I take it, at not being able to see everything on the Earth. 'Thank you so much, you good Empedocles, I said; 'as soon as my wings have brought me back to Greece, I will remember to pour libations to you up the chimney, and salute you on the first of every month with three moonward yawns. 'Endymion be my witness, he replied, 'I had no thought of such a bargain; I was touched by the sight of your distress.
I have always admired Empedocles, who cast himself into Etna. Once I saw a friend cremated, and the brief vision of that white incandescence, before the coffin shot down, seemed to me the apotheosis, the voluptuous poetry of death.
Empedocles affirms that Nature is nothing else but the mixture and separation of the elements; for thus he writes in the first book of his natural philosophy: Nature gives neither life nor death, Mutation makes us die or breathe. The elements first are mixed, then each Do part: this Nature is in mortal speech.
Do but consider this with yourself now, which sort of philosophers render us most tame and civil, they who bid people to feed on their children, friends, fathers, and wives, when they are dead; or Pythagoras and Empedocles, that accustom men to be just towards even the other members of the creation.
And if any one should thus question him; What sayst thou, Epicurus, that this is voidness, and that the nature of voidness? No, by Jupiter, would he answer; but this transference of names is in use by law and custom. I grant it is. Now what has Empedocles done else, but taught that Nature is nothing else save that which is born, and death no other thing but that which dies?
Empedocles, that the air yielding to the impetuous force of the solar rays, the poles received an inclination; whereby the northern parts were exalted and the southern depressed, by which means the whole world received its inclination. Pythagoras and his followers say that beyond the world there is a vacuum, into which and out of which the world hath its respiration.
The contents all answered strictly enough to their title, except that Empedocles on Etna and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning's request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and that Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night, and the Grande Chartreuse had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was most important.
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