Chronography of the Empedocles system: Addenda and corrigenda

Abstract

This article makes available, either for the first time or in a newly edited form, the text of a number of Byzantine scholia bearing on Empedocles' cosmic cycle and including numbers that relate to the successive periods of the cycle. The scholia were written in the 12th century and have been added as glosses to various works of Aristotle. The new information provided by the scholia, so the present study aims to show, is internally consistent and compatible with what we learn from existing fragments of Empedocles' poem On nature. A possible explanation of the origin of the material to be found in the scholia is put forward in the concluding pages of the article.