The Four Elements

The four elements — earth, water, air, and fire — were the Greeks' answer to the question of what the physical world is ultimately made of. Their name, stoicheia (στοιχεῖα), means 'things in a row', the basic units of a series; it was used for the letters of the alphabet, and so for the 'letters' out of which all bodies are spelled.

The four roots

The scheme was given classic form by the philosopher Empedocles, who called them the four 'roots' of all things and held that everything arises from their mingling and separation — drawn together by Love, driven apart by Strife. Earlier thinkers had each sought a single first principle: water, air, or fire alone. Empedocles made room for all four, and added the further question of the forces that combine them.

Elements and the cosmos

Plato's Timaeus gave the elements a mathematical foundation, assigning to each a regular solid built of triangles — the famous 'Platonic solids' — so that the Demiurge fashions the body of the cosmos by geometry. Aristotle ordered the four by the qualities hot, cold, wet, and dry, gave each its natural place and motion, and added a fifth, incorruptible element, the aether, of which the heavens are made. This physics endured until the dawn of modern chemistry.