The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and Deliver Hume Trust.

Today's episode, All You Need Is Love, and Five Other Things, Empedocles.

Today I want to start by telling you something about what you would have held in your hands if you'd picked up a work of ancient philosophy.

I mentioned last week that Socrates was, according to Plato, able to buy a copy of a book written by Anex Agaris. But the word

book conjures up the wrong image. What Socrates would have read was not a stack of pages fit between two covers. It would have been written on a long

scroll. You would unroll the book as you read it, and the writing would be in vertical columns

which you would read from left to right.

There would have been no punctuation, no separation between words, and no difference between

capital and lowercase letters.

All these things were invented later.

The book would have been made of either papyrus, which is an Egyptian invention, a writing surface made from plants, or from parchment, which is made from animal skins. The first philosophers we'll talk about who had the opportunity

to write on paper will be the medieval thinkers in the Islamic world, who benefited from the

import of paper manufacturing from China in the 8th century AD.

And of course, whether they were on papyrus, parchment, or paper, all ancient and medieval

philosophical works had to be written and copied out by hand.

The reason I mentioned this at the beginning of today's episode is to help you picture an exciting

event which occurred about 20 years ago in the library of the French city of Strasbourg.

A scholar named Al-Am-Artagnan was examining some scraps of papyrus, which had been lying around in this library for quite some time, when he made a discovery.

These bits of papyrus had verses of a poem on it.

The poem was written by Empedocles.

This could be verified because some of the verses matched

fragments of Empedicles known from other sources. Thus in the year 1990, the extant remains

...