This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The philosophical tradition remembers Empedocles for a physics: four eternal roots, fire, air, water and earth, combined and separated forever by two opposed forces he named Love and Strife, an answer to Parmenides' argument that real change is impossible. The biographical tradition, less reliably, remembers something else. Diogenes Laertius, writing seven centuries later and drawing partly on Aristotle's own lost writings, records that after Acragas overthrew its ruling oligarchy, the city offered Empedocles its kingship, and that he turned it down, preferring, in Aristotle's own phrase, a frugal life to rule of any kind. The same tradition has him storming out of a dinner party in disgust when a host tried to seat guests by rank and delay the wine for the powerful, apparently on the theory that a city that tolerates small inequalities at the table will tolerate large ones everywhere else. None of this can be checked against a contemporary source; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy warns plainly that the biographical tradition behind these stories contains romantic embellishments of uncertain historical value, and the same caution applies to the far more famous legend, also from this tradition, that Empedocles ended his life by leaping into the crater of Mount Etna to fake a divine disappearance, a story modern scholarship no longer credits at all; he may in fact have died in the Peloponnese. What actually survives of Empedocles is not the biography but the physics: a philosopher who thought the world was built from four things that never change, endlessly rearranged by two forces that do all the work, is also, on the evidence we have, the one pre-Socratic remembered as having said no to a throne.