However, they agree that he was born in the early 5th century BC in the Greek city of Akragas in Magna Graecia, present-day Sicily.

[1] Modern scholars believe the accuracy of the accounts that he came from a rich and noble family and that his grandfather, also named Empedocles, had won a victory in the horse race at Olympia in the 71st Olympiad (496–495 BC).

[2] Modern scholarship generally believes that these biographical details, including Aristotle's assertion that he was the "father of rhetoric",[b] his chronologically impossible tutelage under Pythagoras, and his employment as a doctor and miracle worker, were fabricated from interpretations of Empedocles' poetry, as was common practice for the biographies written during this time.

[c] Likewise, there are myths concerning his death: a tradition, which is traced to Heraclides Ponticus, represented him as having been removed from the Earth; whereas others had him perishing in the flames of Mount Etna.

[d] Diogenes Laërtius records the legend that Empedocles died by throwing himself into Mount Etna in Sicily, so that the people would believe his body had vanished and he had turned into an immortal god;[e] the volcano, however, threw back one of his bronze sandals, revealing the deceit.

Another legend maintains that he threw himself into the volcano to prove to his disciples that he was immortal; he believed he would come back as a god after being consumed by the fire.

[g] In Icaro-Menippus [it], a comedic dialogue written by the second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata, Empedocles' final fate is re-evaluated.

[6] It is in the aggregation and segregation of elements thus arising, that Empedocles, like the atomists, found the real process which corresponds to what is popularly termed growth, increase or decrease.

As the best and original state, there was a time when the pure elements and the two powers co-existed in a condition of rest and inertness in the form of a sphere.

Empedocles attempted to explain the separation of elements, the formation of earth and sea, of Sun and Moon, of atmosphere.

[6][n] But most of these products of natural forces disappeared as suddenly as they arose; only in those rare cases where the parts were found to be adapted to each other did the complex structures last.

[o] According to him, all humans, or maybe only a selected few among them,[9] were originally long-lived daimons who dwelt in a state of bliss until committing an unspecified crime, possibly bloodshed or perjury.

[9][10] As a consequence, they fell to Earth, where they would be forced to spend 30,000 cycles of metempsychosis through different bodies before being able to return to the sphere of divinity.

While flawed, this became the fundamental basis on which later Greek philosophers and mathematicians like Euclid would construct some of the most important theories of light, vision, and optics.

In the organs of sense these pores are specially adapted to receive the effluences which are continually rising from bodies around us; thus perception occurs.

[13][better source needed] Empedocles also attempted to explain the phenomenon of respiration by means of an elaborate analogy with the clepsydra, an ancient device for conveying liquids from one vessel to another.