Chapter 7 focuses on Empedocles’ cosmic cycle, exploring whether and how it accommodates his doctrine of rebirth. First, through a new definition of his concept of double zoogony, the chapter opens with a reconsideration of Empedocles’ cosmic cycle as a regular alternation of two phases, Love’s Sphairos/One and Strife’s Cosmos/Many. Second, zooming in on the phase of the Cosmos and through the analysis of the metaphor of conflict in Empedocles’ cosmological narrative, the chapter investigates the origin and place of humans and gods in the world and argues that the spatial and conceptual mortal/immortal antinomy structures the action of Love and Strife in the cycle. Third, returning to the metaphor of conflict, it is argued that cosmic cycles are loaded with ethical import and that human moral agency determines the shape of our world. Finally, by showing that the moral import of the cosmic cycle seems to ground Empedocles’ religious concept of rebirth on the level of physical principles, it is shown that Empedocles’ physics does not merely accommodate, but seems in fact to be motivated by his belief in rebirth.

This chapter proposes solutions to some longstanding problems surrounding the anthropogony of On Flesh. First, it shows how the author’s three main principles of the hot, the cold, and the wet reflect widely attested beliefs about the effects of heat and cold on bodily fluids. After that, it argues that the author’s two supplementary principles of the “fatty” and the “glutinous” are derived from a traditional dichotomy between bile and phlegm. The upshot of these observations is that the author of On Flesh uses the microcosm of the body as a tool for understanding the macrocosm of the universe. For this author, the natural world is primarily a reflection of the body (not the other way around), and it is specifically medical knowledge that gives him insight into the cosmos. Just as Eryximachus claims to have acquired his awareness of the universal power of eros “from medicine, our art” (ἐκ τῆς ἰατρικῆς, τῆς ἡμετέρας τέχνης, Pl. Smp. 186a), so the other cosmological doctors viewed medicine as a privileged starting point for contemplating the universe as a whole.

This chapter explores the role of traditional and cosmic gods in Plato’s narratives of human and social origins expounded in the Timaeus, the Critias and the Laws. It argues that Plato unifies the two divine families in terms of their common function to originate human beings, but differentiates the traditional gods from the cosmic gods in terms of their political role – Plato regards only the traditional gods as the makers of political communities, which indicates his mild support of the Greek foundation myths and civic stories. This may be the key to the puzzle of why the two families were kept apart in the first place: unlike the uniformity of the cosmic gods, the diversity of the traditional gods provides a good explanatory factor for such a complex, diverse and unpredictable phenomenon as politics. Consequently, Plato’s anthropogony and politogony should be viewed as discontinuous discourses.