SLet’s imagine that all copies of Schiller’s “William Tell” were destroyed in the wars of the twentieth century and we only knew the work because the bookman used dictums like “The clever man builds ahead” or “The ax in the house saves the carpenter”, because theater guides summarize the content of the play or grammars quote individual verses as example sentences. Large parts of ancient literature have been handed down incompletely in this indirect way, including the main works of Greek philosophy before Plato. We only know them because later authors quote from them or report their doctrines. This poverty of tradition stands in distressing contrast to the importance that early Greek thinkers, through their “initial questioning” (Uvo Hölscher), have for the entire history of European philosophy up to such contrasting minds as Martin Heidegger and Karl Popper.
It was therefore a spectacular event in 1999 when Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi published papyrus fragments from a complete edition of the didactic poem “Physika” by the legendary poet-philosopher Empedocles (about 484/483 to 424/423 BC) for the first time. This Strasbourg Empedocles papyrus, copied at the end of the first century AD, was later used as a base for a decorative collar covered with copper leaves, which had probably been put on an Egyptian mummy. The German archaeologist Otto Rubensohn had bought the piece in 1904 from an antiques dealer in Akhmim, ancient Panopolis, who in turn had probably obtained it from one of the nearby necropolises. The papyrus reached the Strasbourg University Library in 1905 via the “German Papyrus Cartel”. Of course, these too are only fragments, but they are not selected based on the interests of the quoting author. In our Wilhelm Tell scenario, this would correspond to finding a fragment of a page from what was once a complete edition of the Schiller drama.
We are nothing but the elements
In the case of Empedocles, Martin and Primavesi succeeded in combining the new find with verses known from quotations and thus for the first time regaining longer coherent parts of the first book of the Physika, combined with new insights into the philosophical content and the poetic formation of the work (this was it , which later authors, such as Lucretius, particularly valued). It was shown that Empedocles can speak of the four elements (fire, air, water and earth) in the we form in order to make it clear that we humans are in truth nothing other than the elements that are not subject to becoming or passing away. In addition, it was revealed that the cosmology of the Physica is designed in analogy to the myth of the gods (demons) banished to an earthly criminal court in Empedocles’ other great work, the “Purifications”. Research into Roman Empedocles adaptors was also given a powerful boost by the Strasbourg find – from Lucretius to Ovid’s Metamorphoses to a little epic wrongly attributed to Virgil, in which the production of a herb cheese is described in a parodic manner in the style of Empedoclean cosmogony.
Almost a quarter of a century after the publication of the Strasbourg Empedocles, people eagerly followed an invitation to Liège, where the young Belgian papyrologist Nathan Carlig, flanked by Martin and Primavesi, presented an unedited papyrus fragment which, according to the learned trio, was part of previously unknown Contains verses of Empedocles. Carlig had tracked down the papyrus, which had probably been acquired from the antiques trade in May or June 1941 by the Société Fouad Ier de papyrologie in Cairo, in the basement of the local Institut français d’archéologie orientale.
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