In order to fully grasp Empedocles theory of the origins of animals, his zoogony, it’s first crucial to understand the function and scope of his physics and cosmogony. Unlike Parmenides, who believed in a unified, material “oneness” of substance, Empedocles believed that the material universe was composed of four distinct and uncreated corporeal elements: fire, air, earth and water, which he called “roots.” These elements were eternal, equally balanced, and governed by two equal and opposite forces: Love, a force of attraction and combination, and Strife, a force of repulsion and separation. For Empedocles, the universe was characterized by an eternal cosmic cycle of change, where the volatile and potent forces of love and strife constantly tango with the material elements, which in turn continually “create” and “destroy,” create and destroy, all life as we know it, ad…show more content… There were heads without necks, arms without shoulders. He describes horned heads on human bodies, bodies of oxen with human heads, and figures of double sex. Eventually, as these hybrid creatures wandered aimlessly around the planet, the uniting power of Love came to be the more dominant force and there came together other, seemingly more coherent and functional but nonetheless still wild, random hybrid beings. Double-fronted beasts emerged, hermaphrodites, ox-faced man creatures and man-faced ox-creatures. Empedocles seems to suggest that most of these products of natural forces disappeared almost as suddenly as they came about; only in those rare cases where material body parts happened to be adapted to each other, and thus were more functional, more likely to survive, did the more complex structures last. Aristotle mentions that the parts of animals came about by solely by chance.
