Empedocles on Etna

Overview

Full title

Empedocles on Etna: A Dramatic Poem

Author

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), poet, critic and, from 1851, Inspector of Schools

Written

Planned from about 1849 and completed by 1852, during the years in which Arnold wrote most of his lyric poetry

Published

As the title poem of Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, 'by A.' (London: B. Fellowes, 1852), a volume that also contained 'Tristram and Iseult', 'The Buried Life' and 'A Summer Night'

Withdrawn and restored

Left out of Poems (1853), whose Preface explains why; reprinted, with some revisions, in New Poems (1867) at the request of Robert Browning

Form

A dramatic poem in two acts (the first in two scenes) for reading, not for the stage: blank verse for the speeches, rhymed songs for Callicles, a long rhymed ode and passages of unrhymed free verse for Empedocles

Setting

Mount Etna in Sicily, in the fifth century BC, in the course of one day: a forest pass at morning, a glen at noon, the summit at evening and night

Sources

The ancient lives and legends of Empedocles of Acragas, above all in Diogenes Laertius, and the fragments of his philosophical poems; the death in Etna's crater is the most famous of these legends

Length

About 1,120 lines: Act I, scene i, 168 lines; Act I, scene ii, 486; Act II, 468

Text in this archive

The Project Gutenberg text (#54985), in three sections, one for each part of the play. Line numbers in this guide are counted from it in the usual way for verse drama, a line shared between two speakers counting once

Context

Empedocles of Acragas (Latin Agrigentum, the modern Agrigento), who lived in the fifth century BC, was one of the most colourful of the early Greek philosophers. He wrote in hexameter verse: a poem on nature, addressed to his pupil Pausanias, in which all things are made of four 'roots', earth, water, air and fire, mingled by Love and separated by Strife; and a religious poem, the Purifications, in which he speaks of himself as a fallen spirit and claims to go among men as an immortal god. Later writers made him a healer, a wonder-worker and a democratic statesman who refused a crown. Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of the Philosophers, collected the stories about him, among them the cure of a woman who had lain without breath, and several accounts of his death, of which the most famous is that he leapt into the crater of Etna so that men would think he had become a god (Diogenes Laertius 1925) (Kirk 1983) (Wright 1981).

Arnold took over this figure, but changed him. His Empedocles is not the confident magus of the fragments, a figure that some modern scholars, notably Peter Kingsley, have stressed (Kingsley 1995), but a sceptical, ageing thinker who has lost his joy. He is exiled from Acragas, scornful of the crowd that asks him for miracles, and isolated in an age of 'sophists' who are taking over the schools. Arnold kept the historical names around him, Pausanias the physician, Pantheia, Gorgias, Parmenides, but invented the young harp-player Callicles, whose songs of Greek myth are heard from below throughout the play (Tinker 1940) (Allott 1979).

The poem was written between about 1849 and 1852, the period of Arnold's 'Switzerland' lyrics and of his long correspondence with his friend Arthur Hugh Clough about poetry, belief and the difficulty of writing in a modern age. It appeared in 1852, anonymously, as the title poem of Arnold's second volume. The volume sold poorly, and within a year Arnold had withdrawn it (Lowry 1932) (Lang 2001) (Honan 1981).

In 1853 Arnold published a new collection under his own name and left Empedocles out. In the Preface he explained that he had not rejected the poem because its subject was ancient, but because its situation was one in which suffering finds no outlet in action, in which there is everything to be endured and nothing to be done. Such situations, he argued, are morbid, and cannot give the enjoyment that poetry exists to give. The Preface also describes the age in which Empedocles is set as one in which 'the dialogue of the mind with itself' has begun, a phrase that has come to describe much of Arnold's own poetry and of Victorian poetry in general (Super 1853) (Carroll 1982).

The poem returned only in 1867, in New Poems, where a note explained that Arnold was reprinting it at the request of Robert Browning, and added that the 1852 volume had been withdrawn before fifty copies were sold. Since then, Empedocles on Etna has usually been read as Arnold's most ambitious poem and as a central document of Victorian doubt: a study of a mind that has outlived the world that formed it, and of the cost of thought without joy (Dawson 1973) (Culler 1966) (Armstrong 1993).

Plot overview

Act I, scene i. Morning, in a pass in the forest region of Etna. Callicles, a young harp-player from Catana, has followed the litter of Empedocles all night from a feast at the house of Peisianax. He meets the physician Pausanias, Empedocles' faithful friend, who tells him that the philosopher, exiled and gloomy, must not see him, but that he may play from a distance to soothe him. Pausanias hopes to learn the secret of Empedocles' famous cure of the woman Pantheia; Callicles laughs at the idea of a miracle and says that Empedocles' trouble lies in himself, not in the times.

Act I, scene ii. Noon, in a glen at the top of the woods. Callicles sings unseen of Chiron teaching the young Akhilleus. Empedocles, asked again about Pantheia, answers instead with a long ode sung to his own harp: the soul sees only fragments, man suffers because he thinks the world was made for his happiness, the gods are inventions, but life still leaves room for effort and moderate joy. Callicles sings of Cadmus and Harmonia changed into serpents and at peace. Empedocles sends Pausanias back to the city and goes on up the mountain alone.

Act II. Evening and night, on the summit. Alone by the crater, Empedocles reflects that he can live neither with men nor with himself. Between Callicles' songs of Typho crushed under Etna, of Marsyas flayed by Apollo, he lays down his golden circlet, his purple robe and his laurel bough. He recalls his youth with Parmenides, addresses the stars, and fears that mind, unlike the elements of the body, will find no home after death. In a moment of release he throws himself into the crater. From below, Callicles sings of Apollo and the Muses on their way to Olympus, and the play ends.

Part by part

Characters

Principal

Empedocles

The philosopher of Acragas, now old, banished and weary. Once a healer and a commanding public figure who drew crowds at Acragas and Olympia, he has given up music and now scorns the people who asked him for magic rather than wisdom. In Act I he can still counsel his friend with a stoic ode; in Act II, alone, he finds that he can live neither with men nor with himself and dies in Etna. Arnold's figure owes its outline to ancient legend but its inner life to the nineteenth century: a mind that has outlived its joy.

Pausanias

A physician, son of Anchitus, Empedocles' old and faithful friend. In the historical tradition he is the pupil to whom Empedocles addressed his poem on nature. Arnold makes him kind, learned and credulous, eager to learn the secret of Pantheia's cure and troubled by the evils of the time. He receives the ode of Act I and is sent home before the end, a man able to profit from advice that Empedocles cannot take.

Callicles

A young harp-player from Catana, Arnold's invention. Light-hearted, devoted to Empedocles and sceptical of miracles, he follows him up the mountain and sings, unseen, the songs of Chiron, Cadmus and Harmonia, Typho, Marsyas and Apollo. He represents youth, nature, myth and the art that still gives joy; his song closes the poem.

Offstage

Peisianax

A citizen of Catana at whose house Empedocles has been staying and feasting. Pausanias goes to fetch him at the end of Act I, hoping his counsel can still soothe Empedocles.

Pantheia

A woman of Acragas who lay thirty days in a trance and whom Empedocles is said to have restored to life. Pausanias wants to know the secret; Callicles says she was subject to trances; Empedocles refuses to discuss the story.

Gorgias and the sophists

The new teachers who have 'got empire' in the schools. Callicles says that Gorgias, their chief, honours Empedocles as his former master; for Empedocles they stand for an age that will smother consciousness in words.

Parmenides

The philosopher of Elea, whom Empedocles remembers in Act II as the leader of his youth, when he and his friends set out with joy on 'the road of truth'. The reference recalls Parmenides' own poem, in which the daughters of the Sun lead the speaker to the goddess.

Callicles' songs

Chiron and Akhilleus

The wise Centaur and his pupil on Mount Pelion, the subject of Callicles' first song: an image of wisdom learnt from nature and handed down by a teacher who had taught the boy's father Peleus too.

Cadmus and Harmonia

The founder of Thebes and his wife, who saw the calamities of their children and were changed into snakes, now living in peace and forgetfulness in Illyria.

Typho, Marsyas and Apollo

Typho is the giant buried under Etna by Zeus; Marsyas is the Phrygian satyr (Arnold's 'Faun') flayed after losing a musical contest to Apollo, and mourned by his pupil Olympus. Apollo, god of the lyre, leads the Muses in the final song. Empedocles reads Typho and Marsyas as images of greatness crushed by cunning and of Apollo's severity.

Themes

The dialogue of the mind with itself

The phrase from the 1853 Preface names the poem's subject. Empedocles' suffering has no outward cause that action could remove; it is the condition of a mind that has become its own object. Act II shows thought turning in circles, between solitude and society, between memory and despair, until the only way to end the motion is death.

Arnold presented this as a modern condition, which had begun already in the late Greek world that Empedocles inhabits. The poem therefore belongs with his other reflections on modernity, such as 'Dover Beach' and 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse', and with the wider Victorian concern with self-consciousness (Armstrong 1993) (Riede 1988).

Thought and joy

Empedocles is defined by the loss of the 'natural joy' that he remembers from his youth with Parmenides, when great thoughts could be received on simple minds. Now he is 'Thought's slave'. The poem repeatedly sets intellect against feeling: the ode's reasoning against Callicles' songs, the old man's dryness against the boy's pleasure in a summer morning.

Arnold does not simply reject thought: Empedocles' honesty is his last claim to dignity. But the poem asks what happens when understanding outruns the power to feel, a question Arnold put to himself in his letters to Clough (Lowry 1932) (Culler 1966).

Stoic limits and the right to happiness

The ode of Act I argues that men suffer because they believe they have a title to bliss and that the world exists to give it. It counsels moderate desire, effort within limits, and the refusal to invent gods to blame or to lean on. This stoic ethic, close to Arnold's reading of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, was the part of the poem that many Victorian readers admired most (Dawson 1973) (Tinker 1940).

The individual and the age

Empedocles sees himself as a survivor from a nobler time, banished and surrounded by sophists and a childish crowd. Pausanias accepts this view; Callicles questions it. The poem allows both: Empedocles' age is hostile to greatness, and Empedocles carries his trouble within him. Arnold's later criticism, with its concern for culture and the 'modern' spirit, grew out of the same questions (Collini 1988) (Carroll 1982).

Poetry, myth and music

Callicles' songs are among the most admired passages in Arnold's poetry, and Arnold himself reprinted several of them separately when he had withdrawn the play. They present myth as a living source of order and consolation, in contrast to Empedocles' abandoned harp and discarded laurel. The play stages a contest between philosophy and poetry, and gives poetry the last word (Allott 1979) (Culler 1966).

Motifs

The ascent of the mountain

The action is a climb, from the wet shade of the forest at morning, through the noon glen at the edge of the woods, to the burnt, bare summit at night. Each stage of the journey corresponds to a stage in Empedocles' isolation, and Callicles, who stays below, marks the distance between them.

Exile and wandering

Empedocles is banished from Acragas and calls himself 'a wanderer from of old'. In Act II exile becomes metaphysical: mind, unlike the bodily elements, has no 'parent element' to return to and will wander homeless through new lives.

Divesting

In Act II Empedocles lays down the golden circlet, the purple robe and the laurel bough. Each gesture gives up a role: the public figure, the wonder-worker, the servant of Apollo and poetry. What remains is the 'naked' mind.

Oscillation

Empedocles describes the thinker 'bandied to and fro' between solitude and society like a sea-wave, and only death will 'Bring him to poise'. The image of a soul driven by winds in the ode returns in the fear of endless rebirth at the end.

Symbols

Etna

The volcano is both the setting and the end of the play. It is the prison of the rebel Typho, the 'fiery world' that Empedocles sees as full of life, and the fire that receives him. In Empedocles' own physics fire is one of the four roots to which the body returns.

The harp

Empedocles has laid aside his harp, though he takes it up to sing the ode; Callicles' harp is heard throughout. The instrument stands for joy, harmony and the power of art to soothe, and its two players for two relations to it.

The laurel

Apollo's bough, the sign of the poet and the seer, which has been Empedocles' 'shade in the world's heat'. When he throws it down he rejects the solitude and severity of the god he once served.

The stars

In Act II the stars first seem to Empedocles to have outlived their world, like himself, and then appear alive and untroubled. They stand for a calm existence beyond human weariness, and they are the last words of the play.

Critical debates

Why Arnold withdrew the poem

The 1853 Preface gives an aesthetic reason: the poem represents a situation of suffering without action, which cannot give the enjoyment that tragedy, properly made, provides. The Preface argues for great actions, classical models and the subordination of expression to the whole, and its rejection of Empedocles is part of a programme for modern poetry (Super 1853) (Carroll 1982).

Biographers and critics have also looked for other reasons. The years 1851 to 1853 saw Arnold's marriage, his appointment as an Inspector of Schools and the end of his most intensely lyrical period, and his letters to Clough show him impatient with poetry of mere self-expression. Some have seen the withdrawal as a judgment on a mood Arnold wished to leave behind as much as on a flawed poem (Honan 1981) (Hamilton 1998) (Lowry 1932).

Is Empedocles Arnold?

It has long been usual to read Empedocles as a self-portrait, or as a projection of what Arnold feared becoming: a mind of great power that has lost its joy. Lionel Trilling's study read the poem as a central statement of Arnold's own crisis, and the ode has often been treated as Arnold's creed (Trilling 1939).

Others have stressed the dramatic distance. Empedocles is one voice among three, and the poem judges him as well as speaking through him; Callicles may be as much Arnold as the philosopher is. Some readers have also seen Clough, Arnold's friend and fellow doubter, in the portrait of the anxious thinker (Culler 1966) (Armstrong 1993) (Hamilton 1998).

The meaning of the suicide

Empedocles' leap can be read as defeat, the end of a man who can no longer feel; as stoic integrity, a free death chosen in a moment of clarity before the 'mists' return; or as an ironic image of an intellect that has cut itself off from the sources of life. The text supports elements of each, and the closing song does not settle the matter (Houghton 1958) (Culler 1966) (Riede 1988).

The question touches the Preface too. If the death is a free act, the poem is not wholly without action; if it is mere escape, Arnold's description of 'everything to be endured, nothing to be done' fits it well (Super 1853).

Callicles and the role of poetry

Does Callicles answer Empedocles? His songs offer harmony, myth and peace, and his hymn to Apollo ends the play in calm. Some critics take him as the voice of a poetry that keeps faith with joy and that the poem finally endorses; others note that his peace depends on youth and ignorance of what Empedocles has suffered, and that his last song, sung to no listener, may show how little art can do for a mind like Empedocles' (Culler 1966) (Houghton 1958) (Bush 1971).

The ode: doctrine or drama?

The long ode of Act I has been read as a summary of Arnold's moral thought, drawing on the Stoics, on Spinoza and on Goethe, and it was praised as such by early readers. Its five-line stanza, with a long rhymed last line, gives the argument the weight of a sermon (Tinker 1940) (Dawson 1973).

But the ode is addressed to Pausanias and suits his needs; Empedocles himself cannot live by it, and Act II undoes its confidence. Readers attentive to dramatic form see the ode as the speech of a man who can still give good advice but no longer take it (Armstrong 1993) (Culler 1966).

Arnold's Empedocles and the historical one

The Empedocles of the fragments is a confident visionary who claims to be a god, teaches a cosmic cycle of Love and Strife and promises his pupil power over wind, rain and death. Arnold's Empedocles keeps the healer's reputation, the exile and the death in Etna, but makes him a sceptic who distrusts miracles and fears that mind has no home. Arnold's poem tells us more about Victorian doubt than about Presocratic thought (Kirk 1983) (Inwood 2001) (Kingsley 1995).

Yet Arnold drew carefully on the fragments: the soul that sees only glimpses, the four elements to which the body returns, the long wandering of the fallen spirit through many births. His fear that mind will be driven back into new lives rewrites Empedocles' own doctrine of rebirth in a darker key (Wright 1981) (Allott 1979).

Browning and the restoration

Arnold reprinted the poem in 1867 at Browning's request, and named him in a note. The episode is a reminder that the poem appealed to a poet whose own work was built on dramatic voices. Its restoration also changed Arnold's reputation: from 1867 Empedocles was read not as a rejected experiment but as one of his major works (Dawson 1973) (Honan 1981) (Allott 1979).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does Arnold let us hear about Empedocles from Callicles and Pausanias before we meet him?

   Compare their explanations of his gloom in Act I, scene i, and ask which one the rest of the poem confirms.

2. Is the ode of Act I, scene ii, Arnold's own creed, or a dramatic speech suited to its listener?

   Consider to whom it is addressed, what Empedocles says of Pausanias at the start of Act II, and whether he follows his own advice.

3. What do Callicles' songs contribute to the poem's argument?

   Take each song in turn, Chiron, Cadmus and Harmonia, Typho, Marsyas, Apollo, and see how Empedocles responds to it.

4. How far does the 1853 Preface's criticism of the poem fit the poem itself?

   Think about the phrases 'everything to be endured, nothing to be done' and 'the dialogue of the mind with itself', and whether the leap is an action.

5. Is Empedocles' death a defeat or a victory?

   Look closely at the lines just before the leap: what he claims about himself, and why he must act 'Ere it flag'.

6. What role does the landscape of Etna play?

   Trace the movement from the shaded forest to the summit, and compare the imagery of water and shade with that of fire and bare rock.

7. How does Arnold's Empedocles differ from the historical philosopher?

   Compare the miracles and claims to divinity of the ancient tradition with Arnold's sceptic who scorns 'the fool's-armory of magic'.

8. Why does Empedocles fear that mind will have no home after death?

   Read the passage on the four elements in Act II and think about Empedocles' own doctrines of the roots and of rebirth.

9. Why might Arnold have ended the poem with Callicles' song rather than with Empedocles' death?

   Consider what the song is about, who hears it, and the contrast between its form and Empedocles' last speeches.

10. In what ways is Empedocles on Etna a Victorian poem rather than a Greek one?

    Think about the sophists as an image of a modern age, the theme of lost faith, and Arnold's other poems of doubt such as 'Dover Beach'.

Further reading

• Allott, Kenneth, ed. The Poems of Matthew Arnold. London: Longmans, 1965. 2nd ed., ed. Miriam Allott. London: Longman, 1979.
• Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Bush, Douglas. Matthew Arnold: A Survey of His Poetry and Prose. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
• Carroll, Joseph. The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
• Collini, Stefan. Arnold. Past Masters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Culler, A. Dwight. Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
• Dawson, Carl, ed. Matthew Arnold, the Poetry: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
• Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Trans. R. D. Hicks. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925. Book 8 (Empedocles).
• Hamilton, Ian. A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold. London: Bloomsbury, 1998.
• Honan, Park. Matthew Arnold: A Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.
• Houghton, Walter E. "Arnold's 'Empedocles on Etna'." Victorian Studies 1.4 (1958): 311–336.
• Inwood, Brad. The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation with an Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Rev. ed. 2001.
• Kingsley, Peter. Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
• Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Lang, Cecil Y., ed. The Letters of Matthew Arnold. 6 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996–2001.
• Lowry, Howard Foster, ed. The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough. London: Oxford University Press, 1932.
• Riede, David G. Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.
• Super, R. H., ed. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Vol. 1, On the Classical Tradition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Contains the Preface to Poems (1853).
• Tinker, C. B., and H. F. Lowry. The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary. London: Oxford University Press, 1940.
• Trilling, Lionel. Matthew Arnold. New York: W. W. Norton, 1939.
• Wright, M. R. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.