Empedocles

Empedocles was born around 494 BC in Akragas, a Greek colony on Sicily's southern coast. He proposed that all matter arose from four elements mixed by Love and driven apart by Strife — a cosmology that held for two millennia. He wrote in verse, unusual among philosophers of his era, and enough survives to make him the best-preserved of the pre-Socratics. He preached reincarnation and rejected animal sacrifice, urging a vegetarian ethic that set him apart. Galen later named him founder of Sicilian medicine. Ancient writers couldn't resist mythologizing his death, spinning tales that turned his…