Empedocles

Empedocles was an aristocrat of Akragas in Sicily, at once poet, physician, statesman and self-proclaimed divine man. He refused the kingship his city offered and was said to travel in a purple robe and golden crown, stilling winds, curing plagues and raising the dead. Legends of his death abound; the best known has him leaping into the crater of Etna to prove his divinity, and the volcano throwing back one bronze sandal.

He wrote two poems, On Nature and Purifications, and more of his verse survives than of any other Presocratic. He accepted Parmenides' principle that nothing comes from nothing and nothing utterly perishes, but rejected the conclusion that Being is one. Instead he proposed four eternal 'roots', later called the four elements. What we call birth and death are only the mixing and separating of these roots.

Two forces drive the mixing: Love unites the roots and Strife divides them, and the cosmos cycles forever between a sphere ruled by Love and a dispersal ruled by Strife. He used the theory to explain perception (like knows like), respiration and the origin of living things, and his account of randomly combined organs of which only the fit survived is often read as a distant forerunner of natural selection.