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In antiquity, Empedocles (ca. 495-435 BCE) was characterized as active on the democratic side in the politics of his native city of Acragas in Sicily, and as a physician, as well as a philosopher and poet. His philosophical and scientific theories are mentioned and discussed in several dialogues of Plato, and they figure prominently in Aristotle's writings on physics and biology and, as a result, also in the later Greek commentaries on Aristotle's works. Diogenes Laertius devotes one of his Lives of Eminent Philosophers to him (VIII, 51-77). His writings have come down to us mostly in the form of fragments preserved as quotations in the works of these and other ancient authors. Extensive fragments, some of them not previously known, were recently found preserved on a papyrus roll from Egypt in the Strasbourg University library (see Martin and Primavesi 1999). The numbering of the fragments in this article follows that of the Diels-Kranz edition; the translations are from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983.

Traditionally, Empedocles' writings were held to consist of two poems, in hexameter verse, entitled On Nature and Purifications. The recently edited fragments of the Strasbourg papyrus, however, have led some to claim that the two were originally a single work. In any event, the papyrus does show the two to be thematically more closely related than previously thought. Nevertheless, the themes of the two parts (if they did belong to a single poem) are sufficiently distinct that separate treatment is appropriate here. Even if there is not a strict separation of the two themes, the first primarily concerns the formation, structure, and history of the physical world as a whole, and the formation of the animals and plants within it; the second concerns moral topics. For convenience, this article uses the traditional names for the two collections of fragments.