Athamas the Pythagorean on the Four Roots

Athamas the Pythagorean of Posidonia survives in one Doric sentence. Clement, Stromateis 6.17.3, quotes him: the beginning of everything is ungenerated, and there are four roots — fire, water, air, earth — from which generated things come. Clement then sets Empedocles’s four-roots hexameters beside him.

The sentence is printed in the Åbo collection of the Pythagorean texts of the Hellenistic period (1965), p. 54. The attribution is dated, uncertainly, to the third century BCE. Iamblichus, VP 267, lists Athamas among the Poseidonians with Simus.

The fragment is that four-roots sentence in Clement, a Hellenistic Pythagorean echo of Empedocles.