Empedocles

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Empedocles of Agrigento, a philosopher of the fifth century B.C., is mentioned by Dante in Limbo among the sages of antiquity. The note to verse 138 of Canto IV presents him as the author of a poem on nature, whose cosmogony, founded on the discord of the elements, was known to Dante through Aristotle's Metaphysics and is also recalled in Inferno XII 42-3. The Dantesque text places him immediately after Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, and associates him in the tercet with Heraclitus and Zeno, two other pre-Socratics included in the same group of great spirits of the first circle.