 Though his work has not survived intact, Empedocles enjoyed a dynamic afterlife among philosophers and their commentators, as well as physicians and natural scientists. According to Diogenes Laertius, Empedocles composed two poems, On Nature and the Purifications. Various other works were attributed to the philosopher in antiquity, including a hymn to Apollo, a poem on the invasion of Xerxes, medical texts, tragedies, epigrams, and political essays, but there is no unambiguous evidence for these. The interpretation of the extant fragments from On Nature and the Purifications is complicated by the modern scholarly debate on whether they in fact constitute two works, as Diogenes Laertius alleged, or a single philosophical project, as some recent scholars have argued (Osborne 1987, Inwood 2001, Trépanier 2004, Janko 2005). The latter, heterodox position has been fueled further by the recent publication of the Strasbourg papyrus (Martin &amp; Primavesi 1999, Primavesi 2008), which contains a portion of On Nature with lines that had traditionally been assigned to the Purifications. This find unsettles the notion of a physical doctrine separate from a religious one, showing that if there are two works, these were much more closely thematically related than was previously understood. Nevertheless, as the topics of the two parts (if they did belong to a single poem) are sufficiently distinct, we treat them separately here. 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 morality and purification. For convenience, this article uses the traditional names for the two collections of fragments. 