EMPEDOCLES, one of the most imposing and enigmatic figures in early Greek philosophy, was a native of Agrigentum in Sicily, and lived in the 5th century, probably from 490 to 430 B.C. The details of his life are full of fable and contradictions. The most probable accounts represent him as belonging to an honourable family in the palmy days of his city, as a champion of free institutions, like his father Meton, detecting the aims of incipient tyrants, and crushing the opponents of popular rights, but as finally forced, through the change of parties that occurred during his visit to Olympia, to forego his native city, and to return to Peloponnesus to die. Of his poem on nature (.7g70-ts) there are left about 400 lines in unequal fragments out of the original 5000 ; of the hymns of purification (KaBapitol) less than 100 verses remain ; of the other works, improbably assigned to him, nothing is known. His grand but obscure hexameters, after the example of Parmenides, delighted Lucretius. Aristotle, it is said, called him the father of rhetoric. But it was as at once statesman, prophet, physicist, physician, and reformer that he most impressed the popular imagination. To his contemporaries, as to himself, he seemed more than a mere man. The Sicilians honoured his august aspect as he moved amongst them with purple robes and golden girdle, with long hair bound by a Delphic garland, and brazen sandals on his feet, and with a retinue of slaves behind him. Stories were told of the ingenuity • and generosity by which he had made the marshes round Selinus salubrious, of the grotesque device by which he laid the winds that ruined the harvests of Agrigentum, and of the almost miraculous restoration to life of a woman who had long lain in a deatb-like trance. Legends stranger still told of his disappearance from among men. Empedocles, according to one story, was one mid- night, after a feast held in his honour, called away in a blaze of glory to the gods ; according to another, he had only thrown himself into the crater of Etna, in the hope that men, finding no traces of his end, would suppose him translated to heaven. But his hopes were cheated by the volcano, which_ cast forth his brazen sandals, .and betrayed his secret.

As his history is uncertain, so his doctrines are hard to put together. He does not belong to any one definite school. While, on one hand, he combines much that had been suggested by Parmeuides, Pythagoras, and the Ionic school, he has germs of truth that Plato and Aristotle afterwards developed. There are, according to Empedocles, four ultimate kinds of things, four primal divinities, of which are made all structures in the world - fire, air, water, e mrth, These four elements are eternally brought into anion, and eternally parted from each other, by two divine beings or powers, love and hatred - an attractive and a repulsive force which the ordinary eye can see working amongst men, but which really pervade the whole world. According to the different proportions in which these four indestructible and unchangeable matters are combined with each other is the difference of the organic structure produced; e.g., flesh and blood are made of equal parts of all four elements, whereas bones are one-half fire, one-fourth earth, and one-fourth water. It is in the aggregation and segregation of elements thus arising that Empedocles, like the atomists, finds the real process which corresponds to what is popularly termed growth, increase, or decrease. Nothing new comes or can come into being ; the only change that can occur is a change in the juxtaposition of clement with element.

Empedocles apparently regarded love and discord as alternately holding the empire over things, - neither, how- ever, being ever quite absent. As the things, - neither, state, he seems to have conceived a period when love was predominant, and all the elements formed one great sphere or globe. Since that period discord had gained more sway ; and the actual world was full of contrasts and oppositions, due to the combined action of both principles. His theory attempted to explain the separation of elements, the formation of earth and sea, of sun and moon, of atmosphere. But the most interesting and most matured part of his views dealt with the first. origin of plants and animals, and with the physiology of man. As the elements (his deities) entered into combinations, there appeared quaint results - heads without necks, arms without shoulders. Then as these fragmentary structures met, there were seen horned heads on unman bodies, bodies of oxen with men's heads, and figures of double sex. But most of these products of natural forces disappeared as suddenly as they arose ; only in those rare cases where the several parts were found adapted to each other, and casual member fitted into casual member, did the complex structures thus formed last. Thus from spontaneous aggregations of casual aggregates, which suited each other as if this had been intended, did the organic universe originally spring. Soon various influences reduced the creatures of double sex to a male and a female, and the world was replenished with organic life.

As man, animal, and plant are composed of the same elements in different proportions, there is an identity of nature in them all. They all have. sense and understand- ing; in man, however, and especially in the blood at his heart, mind has its peculiar seat.. But mind is always dependent upon the body, and varies with its changing constitution. Hence the precepts of morality are with Empedocles largely dietetic., Knowledge is explained by the principle that the several elements in the things outside us are perceived by the corresponding elements in ourselves. We know only in so far as we have a cognate nature within us to the object of knowledge. Like is known by like. The whole body is full of pores, and hence respiration takes place over the whole frame, But in the organs of sense these pores are specially adapted to receive the effluxes which are continually rising from Indies around_ us ; and in this way perception is somewhat obscurely explained.

It is not easy to harmonize these quasi-scientific theories with the theory of transmigration of souls which Empedocles seems to expound, Probably the doctrine that the divinity (baiiumv) passes from element to element, nowhere finding a home, is a mystical way of teaching the continued identity of the principles which are at the bottom of every phase of development from inorganic nature to man. At the top of the scale are the prophet and the physician, those who have best learned the secret of life; they are next to the divine. One law, an identity of elements, pervades all nature ; existence is one from end to end; the plant and the animal are links in a chain where man is a link too ; and even the distinction between male and female is transcended. The beasts are kindred with man ; he who eats their flesh is not much better than a cannibal.

Looking at the opposition between these and the ordinary opinions, we are not surprised that Empedocles notes the limitation and narrowness of human perceptions. We see, he says, but a part, and fancy that we have. grasped time whole. But the senses cannot lead to truth ; thought and reflection must look at the thing on every side. It is the business. of a philosopher, while he lays bare the fundamental difference of elements, to display the identity that subsists between what seem unconnected parts of the universe.

See 11711111m:11, Fragmenta Philosophorunt Grcceorum, vol. i.; Zeller, Phil. der Griechen, Bd. i. (W. W.) EMPEROR (imperator, _rofqtrcop, Kaiser), a title formerly borne by the sovereigns of the Roman empire (see ENIPIRE), and since their time by a variety of other potentates. The term imperator seems to have originally belonged to every Roman magistrate who received from the comitia curiata the imperium (i.e., the power of the sword and authority to command in war). It was, therefore, in strictness not a title but a descriptive epithet. Towards the end of the Roman republic, however, it had become rather a special title of honour bestowed by the acclamations of a victorious army on their genera], or by a vote of the senate as a reward for distinguished services (see Tac., Ann., 74 ; Cie., Philipp., xiv. 4), and in this sense it continued to be used during the earlier period of the empire. Julius Ca2sar, however, assumed it (under a vote of the senate) in a different sense, viz., as a permanent title, or rather as a part of his name (prtrnomen), denoting the absolute military power which had come into his hands ; and it was given by the senate, in like manlier and with a like significance, to Augustus (see Dion Cassius, lii. 41, liii. 17.) Tiberius and Claudius refused it ; but under their successors it soon became established as the regular official title of the monarch of the Roman world, ultimately superseding the name of princeps. When Greek became the sole language of the Eastern Roman empire, imperator was rendered sometimes by i3ao-iX05c and sometimes by carovcircup, the former word being the usual designation of a sovereign, the latter specially denoting that despotic power which the imperator held, and being in.fact the official translation of imperator.

Justinian uses airrospd.rwp as his formal title, and E3ao-tXo.',3 as the popular term. On the revival of the Roman empire in the West by Charles the Great in 800 A.D., the title (at first in the form imperator, or imperator Augustus, afterwards Romanorum imperator Augustus) was taken by him and by his Frankish, Italian, and German successors, heads of the Holy Roman Empire, down till the abdication of the emperor Francis II. in 1806. The doctrine had, however, grown up in the earlier Middle. Ages (about the time of the emperor Henry II., 1002-1024) that although the emperor. was chosen in Germany (at first by the nation, afterwards by a small body of electors), and entitled from the moment of his election to be crowned in Rome by the pope, he could not use the title of emperor until that coronation had actually taken place. The German sovereign, therefore, though he exercised, as soon as chosen, full imperial powers both in Germany'and Italy, called himself merely " King of the Romans " (Romanorum rex semper Augustus) until he had received the sacred crown in the sacred city. In 1508 Maximilian I., being refused a passage to Rome by the Venetians, obtained from Pope Julius II. a bull permitting him to style himself emperor elect (imperator electus, erwalter Kaiser). This title was taken by Ferdinand I. (1558) and all succeeding emperors, immediately upon their coronation in Germany ; and it was until 1806 their strict legal designation, and was always employed by them in proclamations and other official documents. The term "elect" was, however, omitted even in formal documents when the sovereign was addressed, or was spoken of in the third person.

According to mediaeval theory, there was and could be only one emperor in the world, the direct vicegerent of God, who .represented the unity of mankind and of the Christian people on its temporal side as the pope did on its spirituaL Hence during those ages the -Western monarch and Western writers did not admit in principle, though they sometimes recognized in fact, the title of the emperor who reigned at Constantinople ; and the Easterns in like manner denied the existence of an emperor in the West, and maintained that the heads of the Holy Roman Empire were merely German 'intruders. In spite, however, of the universal acceptance of the theory above mentioned, the title of emperor was one which other princes seem to have hankered after. In 1053 Ferdinand the Great of Castile; in the pride of his victories over the Moors, assumed the style of Hispanics imperator, but was forced by the remonstrances of the emperor Henry IIL to abandon it. In the 12th century it was again assumed by Alphonse VII. of Castile, but not by any of his successors. In England the Anglo-Saxon kings frequently used the term basileus, and sometimes also imperator, partly from a desire to imitate the pomp of the Byzantine court, partly in order to claim a sovereignty over the minor kingdoms and races of the British isles corresponding to that which the emperor was held to have over Europe generally (see Freeman, Norman Conquest, vol. i., Appendix, who however attaches too much importance to this English use).

In comparatively modern times, the title of emperor has been taken by the monarchs of Russia (Vassili, about 1520, his predecessors at Moscow having been called Great Dukes of Muscovy, and the title of Czar or Tsar being apparently a Slavonic word for prince, not related to Caesar), France (Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1853), Austria (1805), Brazil (1822), Germany (December 31, 1870), Great Britain and Ireland in respect of the Indian dominions of the crown (1876). Usurpers who have reigned in Hayti, a certain Augustin Iturbide who (in 1822) became ruler of Mexico after the revolt against Spain, and the archduke Maximilian of Austria during his short tenure of power in Mexico, also called themselves emperors ; and modern usage applies the term to various semi-civilized potentates, such as the sovereigns of China and Morocco. It can, therefore, hardly be said that the name has at present any definite descriptive force, such as it had in the Middle Ages, although its associations are chiefly with arbitrary military power, and it is vaguely supposed to imply a sort of precedence over kings. In the cases of Germany, Austria, and Britain in respect of India, it may perhaps be taken to denote that general over-lordship which their sovereigns exercise over minor princes and over their various territories, and which is distinct from their position as sovereigns of one or more particular kingdom or kingdoms, the German emperor being also king of Prussia, as the emperor of Austria is king of Hungary, and the empress of India queen of Great Britain and Ireland.

See Selden, Titles of Honour; Bryce, Holy Roman Empire ; Sir E. Colebrookc, " On Imperial and other Titles," in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1877. (J. BR.)