 Yet Empedocles’ philosophical theories too excited great interest in his successors. Plato regularly refers to him by name, and in the Symposium he puts in the mouth of the comic poet Aristophanes a re-worked version of the origin of the human that lampoons Empedoclean Love and Strife and Empedocles’ interpretation of the evolutionary development of the human species: a former spherical unity is split into two and then only comes together through the influence of erotic Love (O’Brien 2002). Aristotle was similarly influenced by him; he mentions no philosopher with greater frequency except Plato. His critiques range from Empedocles’ treatment of the generation of elements (R 8a), to the problems of Love and Strife as motive principles (A 42 = R 12 and 13), to the motionlessness of the earth (R 14), to the growth of plants and animals (A 70 = R 17), to the generation of animal organisms (R 19). His successor, Theophrastus, devotes a long, agonistic section of his On Sensations to attacking Empedocles’ interpretations of sight, sound, smell, and thought (A 86 = R 25). Timon of Phlius’ Silloi ridiculed his use of elements (A 1 = R 37). Empedocles remained a touchstone among the Stoics and Epicureans as well: a pupil of Epicurus’, Hermarchus, wrote an Against Empedocles in twenty-two books (Obbink 1988), while in his De Rerum Natura, Lucretius offers fulsome—though not unqualified—praise of the Agrigentine, who “scarcely seems to have been born of human stock” (A 21.21 = R 31.733; complete translation of the entire work is in Rouse 1924). Chrysippus is said to have interpreted passages of his poetry (R 40a–b) and the Stoics were associated with the element of fire that Empedocles may have given some prominence to (A 31 = R 41). Sallust composed an entire Empedoclea, which Cicero commended to his brother (A 27 = R 36). Thanks to this robust early tradition, rich exegesis on Empedocles continued in commentaries written on these authors and by the early Christians until well into late antiquity. Empedocles’ immortal hold on his readers continues. Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished drafts of Der Tod des Empedokles continue to inspire modern analysis (Foti 2006), and Nietzsche’s “stillbirth” tragedy on Empedocles has been well-treated recently (Most 2005), as has Matthew Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna” (Kenny 2005).