This revised edition of The Poem of Empedocles (1992) integrates substantial new material from a recently discovered papyrus containing evidence of over seventy lines or part lines of poetry, of which more than fifty are both new and usable.

Offers the first complete reinterpretation of Empedocles – one of the founding figures of Western philosophy – since the publication of the Strasbourg papyrus in 1999 brought new fragments of his lost work to light.

Despite the general scholarly consensus about Lucretius’ debt to Empedocles as the father of the genre of cosmological didactic epic, there is a major disagreement regarding Lucretius’ applause for his Presocratic predecessor’s praeclara reperta (DRN 1.732). In the present study, Garani suggests that by praising Empedocles’ discoveries, Lucretius points to his predecessor’s epistemological methods of inquiry concerning the unseen, methods upon which he himself draws extensively and creatively enhances. In this way, he successfully penetrates into the invisible natural world, deciphers its secrets, and thus liberates his pupil from superstitious fears about death and physical phenomena. To justify this proposition, Garani undertakes a systematic analysis of Lucretius’ integration of Empedocles’ methods of creating analogies in the form of literary devices -- personifications, similes, and metaphors -- and demonstrates that his intertextual engagement with Empedocles’ philosophical poem is direct and intensive at both the poetic and the philosophical levels.

Studies how religious and ethical concerns are an integral and structuring part of the physical system of Empedocles.

Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus the most important of the pre-Socratic philosophers, were at the same time among the greatest poets of the ancient world. But their work is rarely treated and still more rarely translated in its original form--as poetry. The complete extant fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles are collected here for the first time in a translation responsive to the original verse texts. Parmenides' philosophical fragments are here given as the poetic remains of the thinker from Elea in Southern Italy whom Socrates wondered at and Plato held in awe. What emerges from the poetry is at once an uncompromising vision of absolute Being and a compassionate understanding of the human cosmos: It is the body grows to Mind. All men desire the same thing, apprehend the same The plenum is thought, and thought preponderates. The poetry of Empedocles--reincarnationist, naturalist, cosmologist, religious leader, physiologist, and a metaphysician--is presented here in the personal idiom of the fifth-century Sicilian who has been called the last of the Greek shamans: I have already been A bush and a bird A boy and a girl A mute fish in the sea.

The definitive scholarly edition and new translation of all three versions of Hölderlin’s poem, The Death of Empedocles, and his related theoretical essays.

Over the course of his life (550-460 BC), the Greek poet Simonides produced poetic work of every kind then extant. Unfortunately, Simonides' corpus has survived only in fragments, though classical scholars have been studying his work for generations. The 1992 discovery of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri revolutionized the study of Simonides, casting particular light on the epic of Plataea. This edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into a single collection that will be an important reference for scholars of Greek poetry.