Imaginary LIves Read Free

make a picture inimitable. Biography should give as much worth to an obscure actor as it gives to the life of Shakespeare. Deep is the instinct compelling us to note with pleasure the shortened sterno-mastoid formation in a bust of Alexander, or the lock of hair in portraits of Napoleon. The Mona Lisa smile of which we know nothing (it is possibly a man’s face), remains forever mysterious and arresting. A grimace drawn by Hokusai leads us to profound meditation. If the art in which Boswell and Aubrey excelled is to be continued, minute records of great men or epochs or events of the past are not especially needed. With equal care must be recounted the unique existences of men – priests, criminals or nobodies.
     
     

EMPEDOCLES
    Supposed God
     
    No one knows in what manner he was born or how he came upon the earth. He appeared near the golden banks of the river Acragas, in the good city of Agrigentum, a little after the time Xerxes had the sea beaten with chains. Tradition tells only that his grandfather named him Empedocles; nothing more is known. Undoubtedly he was said to be self-conceived, for he was admittedly a god. His disciples were sure that before visiting in his glory the Sicilian lands, he had already passed through four existences, having been plant, fish, bird and girl. He wore a purple mantle with his long locks falling over it; he had a fillet of gold around his head, on his feet were brazen sandals, and he carried a garland of fleece and laurel intertwined.
    By the touch of his hand he cured the sick, or, mounted on a chariot, he would recite verses in the Homeric style, with pompous accents, his head raised toward the heavens. Great troops of people followed him, prostrating themselves before him as they listened to his poems. Under bright skies shining over fields of grain, men from all parts came to Empedocles, their arms filled with offerings. He held them spellbound, singing of a divine crystal vault, the mass of fire we call the sun, and the love that envelops all like a vast sphere.
    All beings, he said, are no more than disjointed fragments of this sphere of love, though hate has been insinuated into them. And that which we now call love, he contended, is our desire to unite ourselves one unto the other, to merge and be lost as we once were lost on the breast of this great sphere-god whom discord has alienated. He invoked the day when the old divinity should rise again after the transformation of souls. For, he said, the world we know is a product of hatred and its dissolution shall be the work of love. In this manner he chanted through the towns and through the fields, the brazen sandals of Laconia tinkling on his feet while a sound of cymbals went on before him. Meanwhile from Etna’s crater rose a black smoke column casting its shadow over Sicily.
    Like a king of heaven, Empedocles was robed in purple and girdled with gold, while the Pythagorians wore thin linen tunics and shoes of papyrus. He knew how to drive away rheums, they said, how to heal sores and how to draw the evil from afflicted limbs. They begged him to make the storms cease, so he conjured with tempests from a crest of the hills. At Selinus he turned two streams into the bed of a third and stemmed a flood; then the people of that place adored him, raising a temple in his honour and striking coins on which his image appeared face to face with the image of Apollo.
    Others pretended he was a wizard instructed by Persian magicians; that he possessed the power of necromancy and the science of those herbs which render men mad. One day as he dined with Anchitos, a madman rushed into the hail, sword upraised. Empedocles stretched out his arms, chanting the Homeric verse on the nepenthe of forgetfulness, and a spell descended over the madman until he stood there rigid, blade in air, forgetting his dementia as if he had drunk sweet poison mixed with sparkling wine.
    The afflicted came to Empedocles outside the cities, where he was often