146 DK, poised for return from exile to the company of the blessed, no more represent an
Empedoclean ideal than do the lions of fr.
Still, while many Muslim scientists balanced the four
Empedoclean elements with various Pythagorean principles, Abu MaaACAyshar did not simply incorporate the movements of planets, zodiacal signs, and decans with human and animal factors governing nature's behaviour.
For even if, like Hippocratics more generally, he would have understood health and illness in terms of a balance or imbalance among the four basic humours (themselves associated with the four natural elements) and hence attempted to restore his patients' health by restoring imbalances among these humours, in B2 he clearly rejects the
Empedoclean equivalence of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth, since among these four Air is supreme.
Pythagorean re-incarnation is scarcely an idea Ovid could resist in his philosophically inflected, concatenated epyllia of transformations, where we may also trace Stoic, Heraclitean,
Empedoclean, Anaxagorean as well as Epicurean vestiges.
Is it an
Empedoclean rival to love, and thus something like the death drive of Freud's final, dualistic metapsychology?
This is particularly so when they suggest that anti-essentialist arguments may be discounted if we acknowledge properly the importance of an
Empedoclean view of nature.
The question has already been asked by Paul Fenton regarding the Theology of Aristotle, (3) and De Smet's analysis of the Arabic
Empedoclean doctrine forces us to ask it more pointedly.
For the catalogue of the Milan show O'Hara wrote that Bluhm's "paintings - passionate, precise, impulsive, classical - embrace the elements of actuality as they are sensed rather than seen, and if there is reference to nature it is to those pure
Empedoclean qualities which we had thought lost: earth, fire, water, air.
For this idea, I was mainly indebted to Sacvan Bercovitch's article "Love and Strife in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy" (SEL 9 [1969]: 215-29), which also provided the insight that the infernal Book of Fate was a symbol of the
Empedoclean cycle of Love-Strife which informs the structure of the play.
Similarly, the reference to the Apollonian song of Orpheus and the
Empedoclean principle of Strife should alert the reader to the corresponding cosmogonic principle of Love.
The relationship between the religious and the scientific doctrines is one of the central problems of
Empedoclean scholarship; modem scholars, moving away from the positivist urge to set hard barriers between logos and muthos, tend to see Empedocles' physics and his religious philosophy as being closely interdependent; and Ovid will reproduce the
Empedoclean model even more faithfully if the surviving fragments of Empedocles in fact come from one, not two, poems, a case that has recently been argued by Catherine Osborne.
In short, the contradictions and conflicts which afflict the Rome of Coriolanus are ultimately located within the
Empedoclean model of nature as a system of concordant discord, amity and strife.
