Fragments of the Philosophical Poets

Therefore, I have gladly adapted myself to the model of my friend in this primary duty of an editor (that was certainly my intention), and no less so in those minute details where one must either approve of the principles or not, unless one prefers to fish for one's own minor glory.

Nevertheless, there were times when I was unwillingly drawn away from the observed example by the very nature of the new work. For instance, I had begun to prepare the fragments according to his method with critical and exegetical notes (for he had not neglected this part either) and to prefix testimonies of life and art to the fragments. I had almost reached the poets up to Empedocles when I saw that, unless I wished to leave those most difficult poets either unexplained in every most serious passage or overwhelmed by excessive interpretation, I would have to include the teaching of the philosophers themselves. For although the mandate of this Corpus commands me to edit poets, not philosophers, I understood that these poems would be blind without the light of philosophy. Therefore, I have attached selected chapters from the doxographers ancient authors who summarized the views of philosophers to the individual lives; once this was done, I hope that as much as has been taken from uniformity, so much has been added to clarity.

Furthermore, forced by the abundance of witnesses, which made the review of this volume as difficult as it was troublesome, I separated the lemmata the headings or subject entries from the notes by interposing the verses themselves. This is not, however, a serious departure from the method. The change in order might seem slightly more serious. Kaibel had established that for ordering fragments of uncertain placement, the sequence of authors arranged alphabetically would prevail. I strongly approve of this principle in general; and just as I arranged the sayings of Heraclitus according to this norm elsewhere, so here I have done with the Silli satirical poems of Timon. For when I examined more accurately the form of the book that Wachsmuth—whom I mention out of honor—had once approved for me, I understood it to rest on unstable foundations. Therefore, so that I would not fall into the same error myself, I willingly applied myself to Kaibel’s method. Furthermore, so as not to appear to have rested on the cushion of sloth, which is commonly called the art of not-knowing, I have prefixed to the fragments a table of contents and a description, such as I conceived in my mind.

But the condition of the philosophers themselves is far different. For here, the non-random arrangement of the fragments had to be put to the test. Truly, either so much had been preserved, as in the case of Parmenides, that the poet’s plan was self-evident, or so little had been distributed among various genres, as with Xenophon, that one could not easily lose the way, or the connection of the thoughts seemed so clearly prescribed by the context of the doctrine itself that it was possible to follow the thread of the arrangement with sufficient certainty through most of the most important fragments.