Upvote:4
Unfortunately Empedocles’ works are largely lost, so what we know about his views is based on fragments quoted or discussed by other authors. In the case at hand, on whether Empedocles thought that plants have sexes, we have only a handful of ancient sources, and only two of these were used by the authors of Flora Unveiled (they did not use the pseudo-Aristotelian “On Plants”). First, a quotation in Aristotle:
In all animals which can move about, male and female are separate; one animal is male and another female, though they are identical in species, just as men and women are both human beings, and stallion and mare are both horses. In plants, however, these faculties are mingled together; the female is not separate from the male; and that is why they generate out of themselves, and produce not s*m*n but a fetation†—what we call their “seeds.” Empedocles puts this well in his poem, when he says:
So the great trees lay eggs; the olives first…
because just as the egg is a fetation from part of which the creature is formed while the remainder is nourishment, so from part of the seed is formed the growning plant, while the remainder is nourishment for the shoot and the first root. And in a sort of way the same happens even in those animals where male and female are separate; for when they have need to generate they cease to be separate and are united as they are in plants: their nature desires that they should become one. And this is plain to see when they are uniting and copulating [that one animal is produced out of the two of them].
Aristotle (4th century BCE). The Generation of Animals, 1.22 731a. English translation by A. L. Peck (1943), pp. 121–123. London: William Heinemann.
† a fetus or embryo.
Second, a discussion or paraphrase by Aetius, as quoted in pseudo-Plutarch:
Empedokles: Trees first of living beings sprang from the earth, before the sun was unfolded in the heavens and before day and night were separated; and by reason of the symmetry of their mixture they contain the principle of male and female; and they grow, being raised by the warmth that is in the earth, so that they are parts of the earth, just as the foetus in the belly is part of the womb; and the fruits are secretions of the water and fire in the plants; and those which lack (sufficient) moisture shed their leaves in summer when it is evaporated, but those which have more moisture keep their leaves, as in the case of the laurel and the olive and the date-palm; and differences in their juices are (due to) variations in the number of their component parts, and the differences in plants arise because they derive their h*m*eomeries from (the earth which) nourishes them, as in the case of grape-vines; for it is not the kind of vine which makes wine good, but the kind of soil which nurtures it.
Aetius (1st or 2nd century CE). Placita V.26. In Hermann Diels, ed. (1879). Doxographi Graeci, pp. 438–440. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Translated by Arthur Fairbanks (1898). The First Philosophers of Greece, p. 229. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
The authors of Flora Unveiled concluded, based on these two passages, that Empedocles had claimed that plants did not have separate sexes, but combined the male and female principle (λόγος) in each organism.