Empedocles was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and a native citizen of Akragas, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is known best for originating the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements. He also proposed forces he called Love and Strife which would mix and separate the elements, respectively. 494 BC – 434 BC; died at about 60. Alive at the same time as The Buddha, Sophocles, Hippocrates, Thucydides, and Confucius. Wiki link