he was called the “wind-stayer”

Diogenes Laertios, selections from book seven of the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

59. Satyros quotes this same Gorgias as saying that he himself was present when Empedokles performed magical feats. Nay more: he contends that Empedokles in his poems lays claim to this power and to much besides when he says:

And thou shalt learn all the drugs that are a defence to ward off ills and old age, since for thee alone shall I accomplish all this. Thou shalt arrest the violence of the unwearied winds that arise and sweep the earth, laying waste the cornfields with their blasts; and again, if thou so will, thou shalt call back winds in requital. Thou shalt make after the dark rain a seasonable drought for men, and again after the summer drought thou shalt cause tree-nourishing streams to pour from the sky. Thou shalt bring back from Hades a dead man’s strength.

60. Timaios also in the eighteenth book of his Histories remarks that Empedokles has been admired on many grounds. For instance, when the etesian winds once began to blow violently and to damage the crops, he ordered asses to be flayed and bags to be made of their skin. These he stretched out here and there on the hills and headlands to catch the wind and, because this checked the wind, he was called the “wind-stayer.” Heraklides in his book On Diseases says that he furnished Pausanias with the facts about the woman in a trance. This Pausanias, according to Aristippos and Satyros, was his bosom-friend, to whom he dedicated his poem On Nature thus:

Give ear, Pausanias, thou son of Anchitos the wise!

61. Moreover he wrote an epigram upon him:

The physician Pausanias, rightly so named, son of Anchitos, descendant of Asklepios, was born and bred at Gela. Many a wight pining in fell torments did he bring back from Persephone’s inmost shrine.

At all events Heraklides testifies that the case of the woman in a trance was such that for thirty days he kept her body without pulsation though she never breathed; and for that reason Heraklides called him not merely a physician but a diviner as well, deriving the titles from the following lines also:

My friends, who dwell in the great city sloping down to yellow Akragas, hard by the citadel, busied with goodly works, all hail! I go about among you an immortal god, no more a mortal, so honoured of all, as is meet, crowned with fillets and flowery garlands. Straightway as soon as I enter with these, men and women, into flourishing towns, I am reverenced and tens of thousands follow, to learn where is the path which leads to welfare, some desirous of oracles, others suffering from all kinds of diseases, desiring to hear a message of healing.

73. Moreover, from his abundant means he bestowed dowries upon many of the maidens of the city who had no dowry. No doubt it was the same means that enabled him to don a purple robe and over it a golden girdle, as Favorinus relates in his Memorabilia, and again slippers of bronze and a Delphic laurel-wreath. He had thick hair, and a train of boy attendants. He himself was always grave, and kept this gravity of demeanour unshaken. In such sort would he appear in public; when the citizens met him, they recognized in this demeanour the stamp, as it were, of royalty.