For Empedocles, as we have seen, aither represents the element of air. We have also seen that this is just what is to be expected of anyone writing in the mid-fifth century—let alone of someone as rooted in poetic tradition as Empedocles. But this is not all. Significantly, his commentators and interpreters often adopted Empedocles’ own terminology and referred to his element of air as aither even though this had become an oddity in the popular usage of their own times. For instance, a passage in the Placita attributed to Plutarch reports that according to Empedocles
aither was the first element to be separated off. The second was fire, and then came earth. Next, out of the earth water gushed out…
And it goes on to add:
heaven was created out of aither; the sun was created out of fire.
This statement about heaven being created from aither agrees exactly with the point noted earlier, that Empedocles himself used the term ‘heaven’ as an alternative way of referring to the element of aither.
But noting how closely the commentators follow Empedocles provides only one half of the picture. It is just as important to watch how easily they slip away from him—for example repeating his terminology to begin with, but then sliding into using the term for air which by their time had become the normal one: aer.
Empedocles of Acragas had four elements: fire, water, aither, earth; their ruling cause is Love and Strife. He said the aer was separated off from the primal mixture of the elements and spread round in a circle. Next, after the aer fire escaped . . .
Here in the so-called Stromateis the original term aither — faithfully retained in the passage from the Placita — has for very natural reasons started to erode away. We also see a similar process in Aristotle. Sometimes, when discussing a particular Empedoclean passage he conforms to Empedocles’ terminology and uses the word aither. At other times, even when referring to the identical passage he uses the more colloquial aer instead. It is entirely understandable that, in most later reports about Empedocles, aither has simply been replaced by aer.
There is one final passage which provides valuable confirmation of Empedocles’ own use of the term aither— although, ironically, it has repeatedly been misinterpreted as showing that his aither was not an element but just a secondary combination of fire and air. The passage is a vivid testimony to the importance for classical scholarship of texts preserved in languages other than Greek or Latin, and an equally vivid testimony to the dangers of relying on inaccurate translations.
Philo’s On Providence contains a passage on Empedocles’ cosmology which has only come down to us in Armenian. This work of Philo was first edited, and provided with a Latin translation, by Awgerean in 1822. Conybeare went back to the Armenian text at the end of the nineteenth century, and came up with a number of alternative renderings for certain expressions and phrases. It was Awgerean’s Latin version, modified by Conybeare’s suggestions, which formed the basis for the excerpts from the work given in Diels’s editions of the Pre-socratics. A fresh translation of the passage concerning Empedocles did not appear until 1969, when Bollack published a French version he had obtained from Charles Mercier. Work done on the text since then has been negligible in both quantity and quality.
The second book of On Providence—the one we are concerned with—consists of a dialogue between Philo and a certain Alexander. Philo is Philo: fundamentally faithful to Judaism. Alexander is a bright spark fuelled with clever refutations of God’s providence, and after a lively debate he turns to arguing that the present arrangement of the universe can be explained without any recourse to a transcendental god. The four constituent elements of the universe, he explains, are arranged concentrically, with earth at the centre surrounded by water which is surrounded by air—which in turn is surrounded by aither. But this arrangement, Alexander claims, has nothing to do with God’s providence; it is simply a physical law. Put oil, water, and sand in a bucket of water—he argues—and the sand will sink to the bottom, the oil will rise to the top and the water will stay in the middle. Armed with this analogy he then returns to his main point:
Well the parts of the universe also seem to have been carried [i.e. to their present locations] in the same way—just as Empedocles says.
It is with the start of the next sentence that the real problems have begun. Awgerean’s and Mercier’s versions are basically identical: ‘For as, separating off from the aither, the wind and fire flew away,. . .’. On the other hand Conybeare, followed by Diels, gave the translation ‘For after the aither was separated off, the air and fire flew upwards’. These renderings are for a number of reasons—both grammatical and textual—impossible. As I have shown elsewhere, the Armenian in fact yields quite a different sense:
For as the aither was separated off, it was raised upwards by the wind (hoιm) and fire.
What are we to make of the reference here to ‘wind and fire’? The answer is not hard to find. O’Brien has carefully assembled the evidence indicating that Empedocles described a massive storm of the elements which occurred when they were being separated out at the start of our world. Some of these passages refer specifically to ‘fire and storms of wind’. The Philo text precisely corroborates these passages, while at the same time helping to fill out the details. It is a tribute to the ease and consistency of Empedocles’ vision that he evidently described these gusts of fire and wind not just as being a natural result of the chaotic initial separation, but also as helping to further that separation by blowing the purified aither up out of reach of the other elements. As for the winds, they are clearly air as well—but air that is still agitated, still mixed up with other elements and not yet pure.31 The agitation itself could be described as the action of something trying to become what essentially it is.
We are now in a position where we can look at the sentence of Philo as a whole, and at what follows:
As the aither was separated off, it was raised upwards by the wind and fire; and it was what it came to be—the broad, vast, encircling heaven. As for the fire, it remained a short distance inside the heaven; and it grew to become the rays of the sun.
The precision of Philo’s report is striking. So is its corroboration and elaboration of the statements by other commentators—not to mention its close relationship to the surviving fragments of Empedocles. For our immediate purposes, some aspects of the report are particularly instructive. In explaining that heaven came into being out of aither, it agrees with the Placita. It also agrees with the Placita in presenting the creation of heaven out of aither and the creation of the sun out of fire as two formally parallel events. And it agrees with both the Placita and the Stromateis as well as with Empedocles himself in distinguishing sharply between aither—the first element to be separated out—and the element of fire.