Why did Empedocles choose to write in hexameter verse, when the prose treatise was already an established option? That is the question that this large, learned, sometimes sprawling study undertakes to answer. In fact, despite its official focus on poetics, by Part 3 this work becomes a general treatment of Empedocles’ art and thought. That, however, is as it should be. Since Empedocles remains largely up for grabs, with fundamental disagreements over the corpus and the unity or not of his thought, it is neither possible nor desirable to study any one aspect of him in isolation, as if the rest were a known or at least agreed-upon quantity. So, far from faulting this as off-topic, I would have wanted more on the doctrinal content.

In the introduction G. introduces the problem of verse over prose and outlines his own approach. G. believes that the Purifications and the On Nature were separate poems – since he does not see how the fall of the daimon, as found in Diels–Kranz fragment B 115 is to be reconciled with Empedocles’ natural philosophy in the On Nature. But G. is not dogmatic, has unitarian inclinations and plans to give the whole matter a rethink (p. 28). Methodologically, G. claims kinship with J. Bollack (1923–2012) and ‘l’école de Lille’, where the study began as a dissertation. Bollack himself was the author of a major edition and commentary of the On Nature in three volumes (1965–69). G.’s own ‘hermeneutic method’ is as follows. Each time a fragment is discussed, there is a close survey of the textual evidence and the citing author's reasons for quoting the passage, a detailed review of the fragment's modern editorial history, extended discussion of difficult words, ‘hapax legomena’ or neologisms, followed by G.’s own interpretation. The main bulk of the book is taken up with these detailed treatments.

Part 1, ‘La Théorie poétique’, focuses on poetry and persuasion. Fragment B 2 offers a sketch of human knowledge, reliant on sense-perception and accustomed to thinking that its limited experience of life is all there is to it. B 3 features a more extended appeal to Empedocles’ pious Muse and some encouragement on how to reach beyond mortal cognitive limits. Recent editors break the fragment up and reassign lines 3.9–13 to the disciple, but G. keeps them together and argues for a change of addressee. In B 131, another appeal to the Muse, G. sees a shift from the situation in B 3, with the Muse now taking over as guide to ‘un divin transcendant’ (p. 189). This phrase recurs a number of times, but it is hard to know what it means, since G. seems to take the standard line that the elements plus Love and Strife are the new gods. ‘Transcendence’ might apply to Love and Strife, but the elements, surely, are perceptible. B 24 is a brief metapoetic statement that involves peaks and paths of song. Its meaning is debated, but G. thinks that Empedocles points out the unity of his own discourse as it ranges over different topics.

Part 2, ‘Le Remploi des formes typiques de la composition poétique archaïque’, opens with a section on Empedoclean prosody and the formal properties of his hexameter. The most notable of these is a marked preference for feminine caesura: excluding lines without a third-foot break, c. 70% of Empedocles’ lines feature a feminine caesura. (In Homer and Hesiod the average is 57% or 4:3 according to M.L. West, Greek Metre [1982], p. 36; Parmenides is at 55%.) Next come Empedoclean similes. After B 84 on the eye as storm-lantern, G. renews the case for taking B 21 and B 23 as a pair, with B 23, the simile of the painters, picking up a number of points from B 21. For B 100, the clepsydra or water-strainer, on respiration, G. does not take sides on the main debate (is breathing through the nose or skin or both?) and thinks the main disanalogy (unlike the water-strainer, blood does not normally flow out of the body) is not a flaw, but deliberate. Next are Empedoclean catalogues, where polar powers supplant Hesiodic genealogy as an organising principle. The final chapter, ‘Couronnes, spirales et ritournelles’, is a study of Empedoclean variation-in-repetition. G. argues that previous editors have over-normalised the text, by suppressing variants within repetitions. He is surely right. G. then offers a close study of the largest single sequence of repetitions with variations, consisting of fragments B 17 + section a of the Strasbourg papyrus, B 20/section c, B 21–3, B 26 and B 35, all from On Nature Book 1. While I endorse the approach, it is possible to worry that G. merely reverses the prejudice: any variation must be significant because it is a variation. Nevertheless, this is one of the more rewarding chapters.

Part 3, ‘La Poésie et le projet d'Empédocle’, first considers Pausanias, the addressee of the material on physics and biology and the ‘friends’ from Acragas to whom Empedocles discloses himself as a god in fragment B 112. After a strange transition on the word ζωρός, G. argues that Pausanias is a significant name (παύω + ἀνίη = ‘pain-stopper’; in the biographical tradition he is a doctor) and endorses the testimony that the Purifications were performed at the Olympic games (Diogenes Laertius 8.63). This means that the Purifications are exoteric while the higher truths of the On Nature are for Pausanias. A long study of fragment B 115 follows, which G. keeps in the Purifications. He finds it notable that the only time the narrator as it were ‘cooperates’ with Strife is in B 115, where he discloses that it was by ‘trusting in mad Strife’ (B 115.14) that he sullied his limbs with blood and earned his exile from the blessed. Otherwise, G. has maintained throughout, Love and the Muse are on the same side. Poetic composition is a work of Love, exclusively, and the On Nature itself is Empedocles’ final atonement for his dalliance with Strife, in preparation of his return to the company of ‘the blessed’ (p. 699). There is something to this, but it seems rather unfair to Strife. G.’s thesis is the equivalent, in the realm of poetics, of Bollack's 1960's revisionist cosmic cycle, in which Strife plays no positive role and merely separates out the elements, getting them ready for Love to begin her assembly-work, Strife as apprentice to Love's master-craftsman. That is debatable.

The general conclusion answers the opening question. As a religious and moral reformer, Empedocles can achieve more by relying on a traditional background, epic, both to undermine erroneous beliefs about the gods and to get his new message across.

G.’s study is a major contribution to Empedoclean scholarship. The text-critical detail and mastery of its editorial history is impressive, and I have learned, in some cases re-learned, much. Most of its merits are in the details, but as noted above, more still would have been possible on Empedocles’ physics and biology. My own biggest disappointment is how little use G. makes of the new Strasbourg papyrus. G. prints only the extant words and leaves even the more plausible supplements blank. In particular, it seems to me that G. underestimates the revolutionary importance of section d, which does nothing less than prove the unity of Empedocles’ thought, if not necessarily the single-work thesis.