The papyrus fragment looks paltry and uninteresting, a fragment only 10.9 cm wide by 13.2 cm high, in faded brown with a hole in the middle, cut out below. Above it are two columns in Greek, on the left the ends of 13 lines of some text, on the right the beginnings of 17 lines, the text in capital letters in charcoal ink. This ancient dog was only identified in 2021 by the Belgian papyrologist Nathan Carlig in Cairo, as he recorded papyri finds there French Institute of Oriental Archaeology.

It was in the early decades of the 20th century that Fouad I, king of Egypt and patron of letters, had created the first Egyptian collection of ancient papyri under the auspices of the Institut Française, which is why the fragment is called the Fouad Papyrus, number 218. Something. Carlig suspected the significance of the find, but since he is not a Hellenist he relied on his wisest, the Hellenistic papyriologist Alain Marten at the University of Brussels and the classical philologist Oliver Primavezzi at the University of Munich.

An important discovery

And hear, hear, the humble little thing turned out to be a treasure. It is true that the papyri of the last pre-Christian and early post-Christian years that have been found in Italy and Egypt do not usually hide important texts, they are often accounts, accounts of millers, ragas. But there are notable exceptions. Professors Marten and Primavezzi have already been lucky once, when in the 1990s they discovered 52 papyri fragments from the 1st AD in the Strasbourg University Library. century, dozens of verses from the 1st and 2nd books of Empedocles’ cosmological poem “On Nature” which they published in 1999 under the title “Empedocles of Strasbourg”.

And now, 25 years later, for the second time. According to the research that the two professors presented for the first time at the University of Frankfurt in June, the Fouad Papyrus is an Empedocles extract, most likely from the same edition of “On Nature”, from which Empedocles of Strasbourg comes. The critical and interpretive edition is expected by the end of the year.

A charming cosmogony

THE Empedocles lived in the 5th century BC. He was the eccentric scion of a rich family of Akraganta, but he fought on the side of the democrats against the oligarchy. He combined the mystic and the healer, the poet and the philosopher. He toured the states with a long mane, a crimson foot, a crown on his head, his signature copper slippers, and a permanent entourage of studious youths. He was a bronze poet of thousands of verses and his two most important works were “On Nature” about the genesis and evolution of the world and “Kathrami” about the fate of the soul. In “On Nature” Empedocles formulates a cosmo-ideal dialectically overcoming the absolute immobility of Parmenides and the unrestrained movement of Heraclitus. The four roots, that is, the elements from which everything is formed, earth, water, fire, and air, are mixed and separated by the alternating action of the two great driving forces, philosity and neikos, within the cosmic sphere.

The passages of Strasbourg illuminate the details of the philosopher’s cosmogony and clearly reveal to us the corners of his thought. The sphere was never for Empedocles the absolute beginning of the world, in each phase it constitutes the result of a new process. Even during the full predominance of neikos the four roots are in a state of absolute separation, but they do not stand still. They remain in an effervescence, while at the same time in the heart of the sphere the defeated pilot is preparing to resume her advance in order to at some point push the neikos to the edge of the sphere again and again, processes that last thousands of years. Empedocles’ philosophy unfolds in all its charm: permanent constants in constant motion.

Deciphering heartbreaks

Until recently, all the passages from the works of Empedocles that we had were quotations from texts by later authors. The first passage of the pre-Socratic philosopher that has come down to us as a direct tradition was Empedocles of Strasburg which is now supplemented to some extent by the Papyrus Fouad. The “flows” in the left column of this papyrus, as Professor Primavezi explained to us, refer to the process of disintegration of the sphere as it receives the attack of neikos. The beginnings of the digital hexameters in the right column allude to Empedocles’ theory of the function of the senses. He believed, for example, that particles of fire cause the visual perception of brightness.

Undoubtedly, Empedocles is a bright example of a brilliant spirit for his time. In the end he even believed himself to be a god and in front of his dazzled retinue entered the crater of Etna to prove that he was invulnerable. He was never seen again and the only thing that washed up unscathed from the bowels of the volcano was one of his bronze slippers.