Mysterious filmy veils: Empedocles on vision

It is quite fair to consider Empedocles as one of the first naturalists. Many of his fragments describe the parts of animals, their composition, functions and origin. Nature as a whole appears to us as a well-oiled mechanism in which different forces operate. As an illustration of this thought, the article considers the fragment B 84 DK. In it Empedocles, according to Aristotle, describes vision. In his characteristic style Empedocles does so by means of metaphor. In the first part of the fragment, he talks about the need to carry a lamp if one is travelling in the dark. But the lamp also needs to be protected from the wind, for which purpose some kind of lantern is attached to it, which prevents the wind from blowing. What this device is remains a mystery. Based on philological analysis, the article tries to imagine how this device might have looked like. The second part of the fragment is a mirror image of the first, it echoes it, but in different words. Here the metaphors of primordial fire, round-eyed Kora, and miraculous funnels attract special attention. Analysis of the fragment shows that the rich religious life of the time could have had a great influence on the formation of these metaphors. The fragment is given in Marwan Rashed's reconstruction.