| Summary: | [How elemental are the four elements? A reading of Arius Didymus fr. 21 Diels]
Arius Didymus fr. 21 Diels is perhaps the single most important source that we have on Stoic elemental theory. The fragment, however, is obscure in many respects and there is no consensus among scholars on how to interpret its central theses. One important question is what are exactly the three senses of the term ‘element’ alluded to in the text. In the currently most important study of the fragment, John Cooper’s ‘Chrysippus on Physical Elements’, Cooper has argued that two of these senses — the second and the third — refer to bodies that are more basic than the four traditional elements that we know as fire, air, water and earth. In this paper, I take issue with this claim and argue that although there are bodies more basic than the four elements in Stoic physics, such bodies are not referred to, not even implicitly, anywhere in the fragment.
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