Empedocles of Acragas (c. 495–435 BCE) was known as a poet, statesman, and physician, as well as philosopher. Empedocles encouraged people to look upon him as a miracle worker. Philosophically he believed there were elements that were the building blocks of everything else: earth, air, fire, and water. These are the four elements that are paired with the four humors in Hippocratic medicine and even modern typologies. The next philosophical step would be to realize a different type of universal element -- atoms, as the Pre-socratic philosophers known as Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, reasoned.
Empedocles believed in transmigration of the soul and thought that he would be come back as a god, so he jumped into the Mt. Aetna volcano.