Missing For 2000 Years, The “lost” Verses From This Ancient Greek Philosopher’s Writings Have Finally Been Discovered

For more than two thousand years, the work of the Greek philosopher Empedocles has survived only in fragments. His ideas were preserved as quotations in the works of later writers, often shaped by the interpretations of Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch. The original voice of one of ancient Greece’s most ambitious thinkers has been largely absent from the historical record.

This changed when a papyrologist at the University of Liège made a remarkable discovery in the archives of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo. Nathan Carlig recognized that a two-thousand-year-old papyrus fragment, cataloged as P.Fouad inv. 218, contained thirty previously unknown verses from the Physica, a philosophical poem in which Empedocles described his theory of the natural world.

The papyrus is the only known manuscript copy of the work. The first edition, translation, and commentary have now been published in L’Empédocle du Caire, edited by Carlig, Alain Martin, and Olivier Primavesi.

A Voice That Survived on Borrowed Words

Empedocles of Agrigentum lived in the fifth century BCE in what is now Sicily. Scholars recognize him as a foundational figure in pre-Socratic philosophy. His work proposed that all matter is made of four root elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Two opposing forces, love and strife, govern how these elements combine and separate. Empedocles expressed this cosmological vision in verse, following the tradition of ancient philosophical poets. Almost none of it survived in its original form.

“Until now, our knowledge of Empedocles’ work relied exclusively on indirect sources — fragmentary quotations, summaries or allusions scattered throughout the works of authors such as Plato, Aristotle or Plutarch,” Carlig explains. “Papyrus P.Fouad inv. 218 allows us to read the philosopher in his original text, without the intermediary of often partial or biased sources.”

This distinction is important. Ancient quotations were often selective. Later authors chose passages that supported their arguments, paraphrased them, or sometimes misinterpreted the original texts. Reading Empedocles through Aristotle is essentially reading Aristotle. The papyrus provides direct access to Empedocles’ own words.

The Expanding Influence

The newly recovered lines discuss Empedocles’ theory of particle effluvia and sensory perception, focusing on how vision works at a physical level. The text has already produced unexpected findings.

Researchers found what seems to be the direct source of a passage in Plutarch, written about six centuries after Empedocles. This may suggest that Plutarch had access to a version of the Physica that has not survived in any other form. The team also identified previously unnoticed references to Empedocles in the works of Aristophanes and Lucretius, showing that his influence reached further than previously known. The study suggests that Empedocles may be a precursor to the atomist philosophers, including Democritus of Abdera.

A Second Renaissance

The researchers offer an analogy to explain the significance of this discovery. If, centuries from now, only a few excerpts from Victor Hugo’s works survived in textbooks, along with a musical adaptation and a theater program, finding even a few pages from an original edition would be a major event in literary history. This is the situation that specialists in Empedocles are now experiencing.

“It is, in a way, to borrow Peter Parsons’ words, a ‘second Renaissance’ of ancient literature,” Carlig says, a reference to the effort by papyrologists to recover lost texts through the study of ancient papyri, similar to how Renaissance humanists once scoured European monasteries and libraries for forgotten manuscripts.

The papyrus is also linked to a partially known set of fragments. Other sections of what seems to be the same scroll are preserved in Strasbourg. P.Fouad inv. 218. This newly found papyrus fragment connects these previously discovered sections to a larger puzzle that researchers are still working to assemble.

Learning from the Original Voice

Empedocles argued that the universe is governed by love and strife, and wrote his philosophy in verse that influenced writers for centuries. These thirty new lines may be enough to refine or reshape the current understanding of his philosophies and worldview.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.