Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/217

Rh that he had been snatched up to heaven in the night. Both stories would easily get accepted; for there was no local tradition. Empedokles did not die in Sicily, but in the Peloponnese, or, perhaps, at Thourioi. It is not at all unlikely that he visited Athens. Plato represents Sokrates as familiar with his views in early life, and the elder Kritias adopted one of his characteristic theories.

104. Empedokles was the second philosopher to expound his system in verse, if we leave the satirist Xenophanes out of account. He was also the last among the Greeks; for the forged Pythagorean poems may be neglected. Lucretius imitates Empedokles in this, just as Empedokles imitated Parmenides. Of course, the poetical imagery creates a difficulty for the interpreter; but it cannot be said that it is harder to extract the philosophical kernel from the verses of Empedokles than from the prose of Herakleitos.

105. We have more abundant remains of Empedokles than of any other early Greek philosopher. If we trust our manuscripts of Diogenes and of Souidas, the librarians of Alexandria estimated the Poem on Nature and the Purifications together as 5000 verses, of which about