This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ancient sources credit Empedocles with two poems. On Nature (Peri Physeos) lays out the physics: the four roots, Love and Strife, the birth and dissolution of worlds and creatures. Purifications (Katharmoi) is about something that looks, on the surface, like a different subject entirely: transmigration of souls, ritual purity, and a fallen daimon working through cycles of incarnation to earn its way back to the divine. For most of the modern history of Empedocles scholarship, the working assumption was that these were exactly what they looked like, two separate poems on two separate subjects, one natural philosophy and one closer to religious doctrine, and that reconciling the cool, mechanistic four-roots physics of the first with the moralized cosmic drama of the second was Empedocles' own problem to have created, not the reader's to solve. Then, in 1994, a set of papyrus fragments surfaced at the University of Strasbourg, badly damaged, reused centuries ago as mummy wrapping, but identifiably Empedoclean. Some of the verses matched or extended passages long assigned to Purifications on the strength of the transmigration material. Except several of them were physics, cosmological material about the roots and the forces, sitting in the same continuous block of text as lines about souls and purification. The papyrus did not settle the question of how many poems Empedocles wrote. It did make the two-poems assumption much harder to defend cleanly, and strengthened the case, now taken seriously by specialists, that Empedocles never meant physics and purification as separate projects at all, that the four roots and the wandering, guilty daimon were always one account of the world, told twice, in two registers.