 The philosopher Empedocles was a native of the south-central Sicilian polis of Acragas (Agrigento). Although the precise dates of his lifetime are unknown, the sources agree that he was born in the early fifth century BCE; according to Aristotle, he died at sixty years of age (DK 31 A 1 = P 5b). Rich detail on the philosopher’s life survives in particular through a late biography written in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, which dates to the third century CE. Unfortunately, much of this is a romantic confection, and is often derivative of the verses of Empedocles himself. It is likely that he was born to an aristocratic family; his grandfather kept horses and was remembered as a victor at the Olympic Games. According to the fourth-century BCE sophist Alcidamas’ Physics (A 1 = P 15), Empedocles was a student of Parmenides of Elea, and later became an adherent of Anaxagoras and Pythagoras. This intellectual apprenticeship, while hardly possible on chronological grounds, does accurately reflect the verses’ engagement with Parmenides’ theories of coming to be and passing away, and Empedocles’ familiarity with the Pythagoreans and Anaxagoras is not unlikely. The third-century BCE biographer of eminent philosophers, Hermippus, by contrast, held that he was an emulator of Xenophanes (A 1 = P 14). In Empedocles’ lifetime, Acragas underwent a series of political transformations from tyranny to oligarchy to democracy. The biographical tradition persistently attributes democratic sensibilities to Empedocles: he is said to have championed the people against those advancing inequality or aiming at tyranny (A1 = P 18–19). Further, he was associated with dismantling an oligarchy of the “Thousand” and rejecting an offer of kingship; similarly, his father apparently forestalled a rising tyranny (D.L. 8.72). These anecdotes may explain Empedocles’ reputation as a talented orator in the absence of any prose treatises. In Aristotle’s Sophist, he is credited with rhetoric’s invention (A 1 = R 5). So too, Aristotle’s On the Poets praised his kinship with Homer in the force of his language and metaphor (A 1 = R 1b). Significantly, Gorgias was associated with him as a student (A 1 = P 24). Elsewhere, Empedocles is reported to have been a physician (A 1 = P 24) and a founder of the Sicilian school of medicine. Evidence for this reputation is present already in the late fifth century in the Hippocratic On Ancient Medicine, which critiques Empedocles’ alliance of the study of nature and medicine (A 71 = R 6). Most provocatively, he is said to have brought a dead woman back to life and been worshipped as a god in his own lifetime (A 1 = P 29), narratives clearly embellished from his poetry (B 112.4 = D 4.4). Like his contemporaries, Empedocles supposedly travelled widely, visiting Thurii after its foundation in 445/4, Olympia, and elsewhere in the Peloponnese. His enemies may have taken such an absence as an opportunity to exile the philosopher (A 1 = D.L. 8.67). Reports on his death are confused. We can be sure that he did not make the fiery leap into Aetna, as was widely held in antiquity (Chitwood 1986). It is possible, but that is all, that he died in the Peloponnese (A 1 = P 29.71b–72).