The Mad Genius Who Gave Us the Elements

Dear Classical Wisdom Member,

What do you get when you cross a philosopher, a poet, a self-proclaimed god, and an amateur scientist? A man who throws himself into a volcano, of course!

From the Big Bang to the Marvel Universe, we obsess over origin stories… but this is nothing new. In fact, the ancient minds wrestled with the same fundamental questions, like: What is the world made of? Where do we come from? Why does anything exist at all?

The 5th-century BC thinker Empedocles tackled these puzzles with all the flair of a rock star mystic. He didn’t just theorize…he performed. He wrote in verse, spoke of elemental forces like Love and Strife, and allegedly believed he was a divine being. And yet, hidden beneath his dramatic persona were ideas that would echo through the ages.

He may not be as famous as Socrates or Plato, but Empedocles’ fingerprints are all over Western thought. He coined the now-familiar idea that everything is made of four root elements (fire, air, water, and earth) centuries before medieval alchemists ran wild with the notion…

He dared to imagine forces binding and breaking the world apart, long before Newton gave us gravity or Darwin gave us natural selection….

And in one of history’s first attempts at empirical science, he even experimented with a clepsydra, a water clock, to prove that air is a substance, not a void….

Indeed, Empedocles reminds us that the drive to understand the cosmos is nothing new. His blend of myth, science, and spectacle challenges the modern mind to consider: must the truth always come in sterile packages? Or is there wisdom…perhaps even genius…in thinking like a poet, loving like a mystic, and asking big questions with a fiery heart?

Read on to meet the man who tried to explain the universe and may have vanished into a volcano to become one with it.

All the best,
Anya Leonard

Founder and Director

Classical Wisdom

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Empedocles: The Eccentric Philosopher

By Jocelyn Hitchcock, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom

Empedocles, born c. 490 BCE in Akragas, Sicily, is perhaps one of the more eccentric pre-Socratic philosophers. He himself claimed other-worldly powers, is credited by Aristotle as the inventor of rhetoric, and is thought to have originated the cosmogonic theory of the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth.

The temple of Hera at Akragas, built when Empedocles was a young man, c. 470 BC.

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