Numbers

The Four Elements of the Greeks

• Air
• Earth
• Fire
• Water

"...philosophers of the Eleatic school (Parmenides and Zeno were the most respected figures among them) were led to concentrate attention on questions of permanence and change by criticizing Heraclitus' view that everything was in flux. Empedocles of Acragas in his turn attempted to solve the same problem by developing the theory of four elements each unchangeable in itself, but producing changeable things by mixing together earth, air, fire, and water in varying proportions."—William H. McNeill, History of Western Civilization. 6th ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 87.

How It's Used

"In the paneled bar adjoining the Great Hall, canvases by an itinerant Spanish artist, Balthazar Nebot, depict Hartwell's gardens bordered by the house's facade as it appeared in the mid-18th century. The pomegranate-colored morning room -- with its luscious plaster ceiling carved in the rococo style depicting the four seasons as well as the four elements -- the drawing room and the library all were Georgian additions around 1760."

"From ragged vents in the ground billow great clouds of sulphurous steam. Here crystal-clear pools of boiling water well up, hot pots of stinking mud burp and bubble, volcanoes throw molten rock and ash high into the air.

"No wonder Gudjonnson calls his wilderness guiding company Ultima Thule, the 'furthest country', a name given Iceland by the ancient world. For the Mediterraneans this was a mythical, rumoured place, an insubstantial island on the edge of the world in which the four elements - earth, air, fire and water - could not sort themselves into any comprehensible order. The ancients were not entirely wrong."

"A drop more logic was introduced in about 300 BC when Hippocrates, often called the father of medicine, floated the idea of tasting the patient's urine to make a diagnosis. The look of the specimen was important too: bubbles on the surface, for instance, signalled kidney disease and chronic illness.

"Wide acceptance of urine diagnosis flowed from the medical writings of Greek physician Galen, who lived from AD 131 to 201. He cooked up a system by which all ailments represented an imbalance between the four elements (earth, air, fire and water), which had corresponding elements in the body -- dry, cold, hot and moist. Whenever things got fuzzy and hard to explain, Galen's theory was simply adapted to incorporate any exceptions that arose."

"The epigram, in the tradition of the Roman poet Martial, often lives on terseness and a show-off polish -- as when John Donne memorializes Hero and Leander by invoking the four elements, a form of compression quite unlike haiku:

Both rob'd of aire, we both lye in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drownd."

"Los Angeles was and remains an elemental place, alive with unique versions of the four elements: earth (it moves), air (heavy with smog), fire (in the hills every summer), water (surf's up!) - and the artists of southern California were moved, in different ways and degrees, by all four."

Also Known As (AKA)

The Four Classical Elements

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