We discussed in the Introduction how a Foucauldian theoretical apparatus could help us identify and examine the specific discursive connections linking Parmenides to Homer, extended deductive argumentation and demonstration to narrative poetry. In fact, I shall hone in on a rather a small subset of the grand archaeological system that Foucault details in his Archaeology of Knowledge. There, in section II of chapter 5, devoted to ‘The Formation of Concepts’, one finds a discussion of ‘forms of succession’, the different sets of patterns or rules that dictate the arrangement of statements in their sequence.Footnote 1 Foucault identifies three ‘forms of succession’, and these will provide the framework for the rest of this chapter and much of what follows in the rest of the book.Footnote 2
After addressing the Foucauldian apparatus briefly, I shall then spell out my purposes in using these terms in the remainder of the book; my strategy will be to contextualize each of these three ‘forms of succession’ within the existing field of scholarship on Homer and narrative more generally (Section 3.1, ‘The Theoretical Apparatus in Context’). I shall then put these terms to work by examining the text of the Odyssey more generally (3.2, ‘How the Hodos Organizes Homeric Discourse’) before addressing the portion of that text most crucial for Parmenides, the first half of book 12, in Chapter 4. What will emerge is that the hodos has the capacity to organize the shape and structure – the ‘forms of succession’ – of a discourse, in this case Homer’s text, in a distinctive way. I shall ultimately argue that the shape and structure of the discursive organization delineated in this chapter provides a blueprint of Parmenides’ groundbreaking extended deductive argumentation, the topic of chapters 5 and 6.
Perhaps the most important level of analysis of the ‘forms of succession’ is the most macroscopic of the three, the level of the ‘rhetorical schema’. Foucault defines this as the rules or patterns according to which ‘descriptions, deductions, definition, whose succession characterizes the architecture of the text, are linked together’.Footnote 3 A core claim developed in chapters 5 and 6 is that one of the main levels of continuity between the first half of Homer’s Odyssey 12 and Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ is to be found at the level of the rhetorical schema. Tracing this continuity will give us a decisive insight into both Parmenides’ strategies for refashioning his ‘new way of thinking and knowing’ and the underlying ‘architecture of the text’ that determines the shape and structure of his extended deductive argument.
The second and third levels Foucault articulates are the ‘ordering of enunciative series’ and the ‘levels of dependence’, respectively. The categories discussed under the rubric ‘ordering of enunciative series’ are in fact the same categories that elsewhere traffic under the name ‘Discourse Modes’, ‘Text-Types’, or, more traditionally, ‘Rhetorical Modes’.Footnote 4 In Foucault’s scheme these are three in number: we may refer to them here by their more familiar names, ‘narration’, ‘description’, and ‘argument/inference’. Foucault does not define the ‘levels of dependence’, electing instead simply to exemplify them; the examples given include ‘hypothesis/verification, assertion/critique, general law/particular application’. Although Foucault stresses that ‘types of dependence’ between units of statements need not be ‘superposable on’ the categories that comprise the ‘orderings of enunciative series’, that is in fact precisely how I wish to make use of these categories in the analysis to come. More specifically, I shall take the ‘orderings of enunciative series’ as the base units of analysis in my discussion of various hodoi elaborated in the course of the Odyssey, and, with these in hand, shall attempt to see how the rhetorical schema governed by the figure of the hodos determines an overarching pattern of organization – a discursive architecture distinctive to the figure of the hodos – out of these base units.Footnote 5
If it is dry work to summarize technical aspects of Foucault’s system in the abstract, the application of this schema in what follows will make it clearer what precisely is meant by the terms in question, and how they work. I shall undertake this in Section 3.2; the next step, however, is to anchor Foucault’s apparatus in current discussions in Homeric scholarship.
3.1 The Theoretical Apparatus in Context
3.1.1 The oimē, Themes, and Rhetorical Schemata
At first glance, Foucault’s notion of a rhetorical schema might be thought to approach two topics in Homeric studies: the use of metapoetic devices, and so-called catalogic discourse. The latter we shall explore below (see Section 3.1.4); the former we shall examine here, in large part to clarify one way in which I do not intend to use Foucault’s term when discussing epic poetry.
Scholars have discerned a number of metapoetic images at work at various points in the Iliad and the Odyssey. According to one view, the poem is a craft production, an object constructed in the manner of Odysseus’ raft, for example, or his well-made bed.Footnote 6 According to a more well-developed tradition, the Homeric text has been seen to emerge at the intersection of imagery related to weaving and sewing.Footnote 7 The unavoidable point of comparison in this context, however, is the oimē, or ‘path of song’.Footnote 8
Although there may seem to be many tantalizing similarities between the oimē as a metapoetic figure and what we shall examine under the rather cumbersome name of the ‘rhetorical schema of the figure of the hodos’, caution must be exercised.Footnote 9 One prominent conceptualization of the oimē takes each particular segment of the path to be a ‘theme’ in the Parry–Lord sense;Footnote 10 the idea is that these oimai are ‘tracks cut into the landscape’ that link together end on end and, taken collectively, define a ‘map’ of Epos.Footnote 11 Are these oimai, perhaps, coextensive with Foucauldean rhetorical schemata?
The answer, at least in this book, is no. The reason the answer is no depends in part, however, on just what it is that one means by oimē. The way that the word is used in the Odyssey suggests that an oimē in fact comprises a relatively large unit. Demodocus’ postprandial performance, described in terms of an oimē in one of only three passages where the word appears in Homer, encompasses ‘The Quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles’; later, Odysseus will ask him to ‘move along [the path of song] and sing “The Fashioning of the Wooden Horse”’.Footnote 12 These are both apparently rather lengthy productions; if that is the case, their scale is larger than that to which the rhetorical schema of the hodos will refer. (For comparison, Circe’s foretelling of Odysseus’ hodos in Odyssey 12, the central example of the rhetorical schema of the hodos that I examine below, occupies slightly more than 100 lines (12.27–141) of the four books of aoidē Odysseus makes it through in a single evening with the Phaeacians; one hardly imagines that Demodocus discharges his duties with such brevity.) On this understanding, an oimē would seem to be something considerably longer than the amount of text governed by a rhetorical schema, at least as we find it in Homer.Footnote 13
Other discussions of the oimē emphasize the idea that it is something that a poet can hop on or off at any number of points along the grand path of Epos as a whole. On this view, as a poet performs, ‘no matter how small the scale of the performance’ he or she would simply be on the oimē, the ‘path of song’, in virtue of orally performing a poem.Footnote 14 There is an important question, not always clearly expressed, about whether this idea should focus on the word-by-word, line-by-line process of bardic composition, or whether individual units on this larger epic path of song correspond to something closer to a Parry–Lord ‘theme’.Footnote 15
In the first case, the claims scholars have made about the way that the structure of a text conforms to certain patterns – and is perhaps even dictated by certain rules – are very much of the sort I shall develop below. Here again, however, there is an important difference of scale. This strand of analysis of the ‘path of song’ addresses units of text – phrases and lines – of a smaller scale than I intend to investigate via the term ‘rhetorical schema’; rather, units of text of this size are better discussed under the rubric ‘types of dependence’, addressed in Section 3.1.3 below.
In the second case, it is possible to imagine the relationship between a theme and an oimē as corresponding to, or perhaps instantiating, a form of the narratological distinction between story and plot or narrative. This is an attractive hypothesis, and it opens a vista onto an exciting perspective of Homeric poetics. But any such relationship between story and narrative is also different in kind from the relationship I wish to capture under the term ‘rhetorical schema’. Why so? If, on the one hand, any theme can be expressed along the path of song (and, on this view, all themes necessarily would be) and, on the other, every path of song maps onto simply one or another of the ‘themes’ in the mythic repertoire, then the level of connection between the content of the story (the theme) and the manner in which it is narrativized (via movement along the path of song) as plot is necessarily a rather general one.Footnote 16 By contrast, as we shall see, the rhetorical schema governed by the hodos, at least as I examine it here, dictates a far more precise relationship between story and narrative. While it is undoubtedly valuable to combine the two understandings of oimē as ‘theme’ and ‘path of song’,Footnote 17 current scholarship on this topic allows for considerable flexibility in the relationship between the level of story and the level of plot – and this gap between the more macro structure of a theme and the micro structure of a visual poetics of the oimē is precisely the gap filled in part by the rhetorical schema that will be so important in what follows.Footnote 18
3.1.2 Text-Types, Discourse Modes, and Enunciative Modalities
Classic studies of text-types define these to be ‘underlying (or overriding) structures that can be actualized by different surface forms’.Footnote 19 On the traditional view, there is always a single, dominant (underlying or overriding) text-type that characterizes any given text. Because the roots of this approach to textual analysis are to be found in literary criticism, the text-type ‘narration’ has received the most attention and usually serves as the central, positively constructed term against which other text-types are negatively defined.Footnote 20 Two aspects of narration are usually deemed key characteristics: first, that narration depicts ‘events or sequences of events’ and, second, that the ‘order in which events happen is significant’.Footnote 21 By contrast, description is ‘oriented to the statics of the world – states of affairs, enduring properties, coexistants’;Footnote 22 it often introduces elements of the story-world – persons, places, things – and/or attributes qualities to these elements.Footnote 23
While in the case of narration the text’s underlying progression is primarily temporal, in the case of description the text’s underlying progression is primarily spatial.Footnote 24 Scholars have often claimed that important implications follow from this. As noted, the narration of events whose temporal order is significant endows their narration with ‘a natural principle of coherence, one that enables the narrator to construct his presentation sequence … according to the logic of progression inherent in the line or chain of events itself; from earlier to later’; by contrast, and significantly for the analysis to be undertaken here, ‘the descriptive sequence’ is denied ‘any natural resource of coherence’.Footnote 25
More recently, the study of discourse modes, a linguistically inspired method of analysis, has emerged in parallel to the study of text-types.Footnote 26 The key insight animating this enterprise is that several features of the surface text preponderate in – or are understood to be the hallmark of – narrative or descriptive portions of text.Footnote 27 We may note three features.
First, verb forms. Tense-aspect in particular has long been recognized as ‘the most important distinctive linguistic feature’ associated with each of the text-types or discourse modes.Footnote 28 Reflecting the fact that narration is usually defined in connection with the notion of the event, the aorist and historical present are often intimately associated with narration; so, too, as we shall see, is the future tense when the narrative takes the form of a ‘prior narration’.Footnote 29 Person and mood also prove significant: description does not use the second person or the imperative mood, both of which can be found in narration.
Second, the notion that the underlying progression of the text is temporal in narration and inherently unordered in description has a correlate at the surface level of the text. This can be seen from two perspectives: from the perspective of the story and from the perspective of the plot. On the one hand, narrative portions of a text usually progress along with time in the story world; on the other, the passage of time in the story-world is most commonly expressed through, or recorded by, a sequence of narration. By contrast, movement through a descriptive passage does not necessarily suggest the passage of time in the story-world, nor does the passage of time in the story-world necessarily register in passages of description.Footnote 30
Third, textual progression is often marked by temporal adverbs (or combinations of temporal adverbs and specific particles) in the case of high-narrativity portions of text. On the other hand, spatial adverbs (or combinations of spatial adverbs and specific particles) predominate in high-descriptivity sections.Footnote 31
So much for narration and description. What of argument? In fact, typologies of ‘argument’ are much harder to produce. There are three obstacles. First, the topic is under-researched, and analysts of discourse modes or text-types have simply not devoted much attention to differentiating ‘argument’ from ‘description’ or ‘narration’.Footnote 32 Second, in cases where analysts have undertaken this task, their definitions of ‘argument’ are usually so inextricably bound up in a formal, modern understanding of what constitutes an argument that it is difficult to apply such a category to a pre-Aristotelian text like the Homeric poems.Footnote 33 The third stems from Parmenides’ own role in developing argument (and, specifically, extended deductive argument) and the fact that he is a key point of transition in the forms that an argument might take. Since this very transition is the central topic under investigation here, as noted in the Introduction, deciding what constitutes an ‘argument’ without already assuming the accomplishment of the phenomenon whose development we are attempting to observe is a problem.
For the purposes of this project, I shall consider a portion of text to instantiate an ‘argument’ discourse mode if it is formed of a cluster of statements that are linked inferentially; that is, if it is formed of a cluster of statements some of which explicitly provide a justification or rationale for others.Footnote 34 At the surface level of the text, argument sections will be particularly densely populated by conditional clausesFootnote 35 or purpose clauses, which tease out the implications of certain actions or justify pieces of instruction, and by specific usesFootnote 36 of epeiFootnote 37 and garFootnote 38 (to be examined in further detail below).
3.1.3 A-B-C Patterns, and Types of Dependence
Some long-standing conversations in Homeric scholarship, particularly classic studies on catalogues and battle scenes, provide important parallels for the notion of a ‘type of dependence’.Footnote 39 In the Catalogue of Ships, for example, every entry is organized in relation to (a) ‘nation/generals’, (b) ‘places’, (c) ‘number of ships’;Footnote 40 in some instances, further genealogical background for key protagonists is provided.Footnote 41 These categories can also be examined under a more general typology where anecdotes supplement the ‘basic information’ (e.g. names and places in the Catalogue of Ships) with biographical information, while ‘contextual information’ offers ‘what is relevant to the context’ in which the list occurs.Footnote 42
Somewhat more recently, Egbert Bakker has suggested that the so-called A-B-C pattern detailed above is the product of an oral compositional technique that operates through a process of ‘framing’ and ‘goal-setting’:Footnote 43 the basic information demarcates the frame of vision and ‘orients’ listeners as to the future direction of the text.Footnote 44 Detail ‘added’ to the ‘frame’ ‘lends depth and significance’ to the goal, which is the event presented.Footnote 45 By means of this repeated pattern of elements, the epic narrator opens up narrative space, provides direction, and intensifies the experience of listeners.Footnote 46
I shall argue in Section 3.2 below and in Chapter 4 that the rhetorical schema governed by the figure of the hodos makes available a framework of relationships between discursive units (i.e. its own distinctive ‘type of dependence’) that operates in a manner closely paralleling the A-B-C pattern and Bakker’s elaborations on it.Footnote 47 This framework need not be exploited but is available to be activated any time the figure of the hodos is mobilized, as Circe’s two long speeches in Odyssey 10 and 12 make clear.
3.1.4 Catalogues
Discussion of the A-B-C pattern brings us to one final topic of Homeric scholarship that needs to be addressed: the notion of catalogic discourse. A great deal has been said about this topic, its relationship to oral composition, the development of epic narrative forms, and its cognitive functions and their place in a society that is either preliterate or largely so.Footnote 48 Scholars have discussed three principles of catalogic discourse that are pertinent in this setting: that there is some kind of underlying classificatory rubric according to which catalogued items merit inclusion in the catalogue;Footnote 49 that these items form the entries – often specifically delimited by ‘entry headings’ – that make up the catalogue;Footnote 50 and that these entries are enumerated sequentially.Footnote 51
It is this final point that will prove the most crucial for the remainder of this chapter, and indeed much of the remainder of this book. How are the entries to be ordered? There may seem to be two extremes. On the one hand is the list: ‘a list presents items that are more than one in number … and have something to do with each other; but quite unlike narrative, the order of its items may be reversible or subject to free transpositions … the actual order of entries need not follow any scheme or have any obvious significance.’Footnote 52 On the other hand is what we might call a series, where the order of the items catalogued is not reversible or subject to free transpositions but is strictly determined according to some rule or principle. An example of a Homeric list would be the catalogue of Nereids at Il. 18.38–49; is there any sense that it matters whether or not Glauke comes first, Amatheia last, and Doto and Proto in the middle? By contrast, an archetypal epic series can be found at lines 133–53 of Hesiod’s Theogony (or even the parthenogenic portion at lines 126–32). There is simply no question of Gaia coming after, say, Cronus or the Cyclopes (or even the mountains or Pontus): because she begets them, she must plainly precede them.
3.2 How the hodos Organizes Homeric Discourse: Forms of Succession
Ulysses’ journey, like that of Oedipus, is an itinerary. And it is a discourse, the prefix of which I can now understand. It is not at all the discourse (discours) of an itinerary (parcours), but, radically, the itinerary (parcours) of a discourse (discours), the course, cursus, route, path that passes through the original disjunction.Footnote 53
In the Odyssey, the successions in the narration are regulated by the scheme of the path, thus preserving the primacy of catalogic discourse.Footnote 54
It is time to put these distinctions to work. My fundamental claim comprises the following components. The hodos, understood as a kind of catalogic discourse, structures the discursive architecture of portions of a text according to its own distinctive rhetorical schema; it yields a series, that is, by providing a set of rules or principles according to which items that form entries enumerated in the catalogue can be linked (articulating these rules or principles will be one of the main objectives of this chapter). This rhetorical schema in turn dictates its own distinctive manner of relating one to another the internal components that make up individual entries; this pattern will be examined in terms of a specific ‘type of dependence’. Finally, the base unit I shall consider for examination is the unit of the text that is defined by text-type or discourse mode, be it narration, description, or argument (see Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 Summary of the framework: The hodos and forms of succession
In chapters 5 and 6, I shall show how Parmenides reappropriates this framework for his own ends. More specifically, by retaining the rhetorical schema of the figure of the hodos but substituting claims about the nature of what-is in place of toponyms and place descriptions as the items that make up entries in the catalogic discourse of the hodos, he produced the first recorded sequence of extended deductive argumentation. Parmenides’ new creation will thus have the rigorous and clearly defined rules for sequential ordering of narration, as opposed to the ‘inherent unorderliness’ of description; it will also be made up of statements that address the statics of the world and its enduring properties, as opposed to actions and events. What we shall find, that is to say, is narrativity without narration and description without descriptivity – or, as we would call it, an extended deductive argument.
3.2.1 Catalogues: Constituting the Field of Statements
Understanding the discursive architecture governed by the figure of the hodos as a kind of catalogic discourse requires us to address three features of catalogues. First, catalogic discourse both demarcates the boundaries of a kind of closed set and structures the field of statements it encompasses in such a way as to facilitate the process of classification.Footnote 55 By grouping together a bundle of discrete entities – be they places, individuals, objects – within a single, unifying framework, catalogic discourse organizes the terrain of the field of statements in such a way as to suggest (or, from another perspective, presuppose) a kind of underlying conceptual unity that encompasses the items enumerated.Footnote 56 Second, the catalogic form can articulate the individual items it enumerates as discrete items by framing each entity as an ‘entry’ (with, furthermore, a particular quality that grants it membership in the catalogic set).Footnote 57 Third, by unifying in a single set the discrete entities it enumerates, the catalogic mode of discourse in general makes it possible to indicate the entire set and its component entities in a single shorthand.
An example may help illuminate these points. Unlike the later routes that traverse the fabulous spaces of the Apologoi, the journey Athena maps out in Odyssey 1 remains squarely within the bounds of the ordinary Greek world and is therefore perhaps the simplest, least elaborate journey spelled out in the Odyssey.Footnote 58 We discussed above (Section 1.2) the moment Athena sets the plot of books 1–4 in motion by proposing to Telemachus that he (Od. 1.284–91):
The sequential enumeration of the items – Pylos, Sparta, native land (Ithaca) – is evident. The lexical items that demarcate the entries and articulate the specific items, the pair ἐς and -δε (discussed above in Section 1.2), are equally clear. The underlying conceptual unity established across these items is a more complex question.Footnote 59
Third, the itinerary, with its clear point of origin (where we are now: in this case, Ithaca) and its precisely identified final destination (νοστήσας … ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν), determines the boundary markers of a closed set, one that encompasses Ithaca, Pylos, Sparta (and Ithaca again). As a result of being fused into a single unit, the entire ordered sequence of places can be intensively summarized by the single word hodos (instead of requiring that each destination be listed extensively). Here the scene in book 1 proves particularly illustrative: two hundred lines and an afternoon’s worth of arguments with the suitors after Athena set the Telemachy into motion, we find Telemachus in his private chambers (Od. 1.443–44):
As a kind of catalogue, the hodos-itinerary marks out the boundaries of a category or the limits of a set. In the course of doing so it creates a distinct unit, the constituent elements of which can be summarized or indexed as a unit or as a bundle of different elements.
3.2.2a Rhetorical Schemata: The hodos Orders Places
The kind of discursive architecture organized by the figure of the hodos, then, is fundamentally catalogic in nature insofar as it enumerates items sequentially within a larger set susceptible to conceptual unification; in addition, it articulates the members in its set as discrete items through the catalogue’s system of ‘entries’. But what kinds of items fill entries in a catalogue, and what principles govern the order of the sequence in which they are enumerated? These are the two parameters that define the different species in the family of catalogues.
Some catalogues take as items the warriors of an army, and the principle according to which entries are sequenced is that of spatial contiguity.Footnote 60 Others take the trees in an old man’s garden sequenced according to a similar principle.Footnote 61 Yet others take living creatures as their items and order entries according to a principle of genesis or begetting: this is, of course, the genealogy. The genealogy is sometimes coupled with the hodos-itinerary as a complementary kind of catalogue, the former operating ‘temporally’, the latter ‘spatially’.Footnote 62 One can understand why (Od. 1.284–85, 291):
The items enumerated in this catalogue are toponyms (and therefore refer to places), and their position as an entry is demarcated by the spatially oriented lexical items (ἐς, -δε) that highlight them as such.Footnote 63
3.2.2b Rhetorical Schemata: The hodos Orders Places
Further consideration of the sequence according to which items in this mini-catalogue are enumerated, however, clearly reveals this simple binary between a ‘spatial’ and a ‘temporal’ conception of catalogic discourse to be incomplete. It is vital to appreciate here that the temporal dimension also plays an important role in configuring the rhetorical schema of the hodos; the figure of the hodos orders spatial relationships according to movement through space in time, with its linear, sequential flow. So, in the same example (Od. 1.284–85, 291):
This is where the distinction between a list and an ordered series becomes relevant: if the Catalogue of Ships orders men according to a principle of geographical (spatial) contiguity, we might imagine a Catalogue of Places that simply takes the toponyms, rather than the names of the warriors who dwell there, as the items in its entries.Footnote 64 Like the hodos spelled out by Athena, it, too, would be formed of items united by their underlying spatial nature. What we find above, of course, is something radically different: as the sequence of particles and adverbs πρῶτα μὲν … κεῖθεν δὲ … δὴ ἔπειτα makes explicit, the order in which these place items occur is not reversible or, as Sammons puts it, ‘subject to free transpositions’; rather, their sequence seems determined by an underlying principle or pattern. The hypothetical Catalogue of Places would, as a catalogue at least (and a repository of information), be the same whether it began with the poleis of Thessaly or Boeotia, whether the islands of the eastern Aegean led to those of western Greece or the other way around;Footnote 65 the Catalogue of Ships (or hypothetical Catalogue of Places) shares important features, that is, with the list.Footnote 66 By contrast, Telemachus’ itinerary would by no means be the same were he to begin with Sparta and return to Ithaca by way of Pylos – for a variety of reasons, logistical and narrative. The order of the sequence matters: the rhetorical schema of the hodos structures the items that form entries in a series. More specifically, it orders a series of spatial items (places) according to a temporal progression.Footnote 67
3.2.2c Rhetorical Schemata: Narrativity of the hodos-Itinerary
But what dictates the order of this progression? What principle or set of rules determines the order of the sequence by which may be enumerated the items that make up the hodos announced by Athena? We may note that closely tied up with the temporal dimension that is constitutive of the hodos-itinerary is the implicit need to move – in time – from one place-item to another. This element of action is another of the main aspects distinguishing the hodos from the hypothetical Catalogue of Places. Another look at the same passage reveals this activity-based dimension:
Above, we defined narration as ‘the representation of an event or sequence of events’, a sequence where, furthermore, ‘the order in which events happens is significant’.Footnote 68 Even stripped to its essentials, it is clear that the skeleton ‘[f]irst to Pylos, then to Sparta, finally home’ implicitly contains the ‘events’ ‘[f]irst [go] to Pylos, then [go] to Sparta, finally [go] home’. The progression of the text tracks this significance and marks it out explicitly with the string of temporal adverbs πρῶτα, κεῖθεν, ἔπειτα. Events are likewise presented in the aorist and/or imperative, features closely associated with the discourse mode of narration. It is thus the narrativity of this portion of text (as a result of which the ordering of events is significant) that imparts a necessary order to the sequential enumeration of places that make up entries in Athena’s hodos-catalogue.
3.2.3 Rhetorical Schemata and Types of Dependence: A Temporally Ordered Sequence of Places as a Framework for Description
That is not all, however. The story is more complex. So, too, is the first hodos that Circe delineates for Odysseus, the one we find in Odyssey 10. It may take no special knowledge to sign out the path from Ithaca to the mansions of Nestor and Menelaus on the familiar terrain of the Peloponnese; what emerges there is the significance of the sequence in which these visits are ordered. The same is not true of the route from Aeaea to the Underworld – for, as Odysseus laments, ‘no man has ever yet travelled to Hades in a black ship’ (Od. 10.502). Circe gives the following set of directions in response (Od. 10.505–16):
In this passage, we see on display the hallmarks of the discursive structure governed by the hodos: a bounded range of places ordered sequentially (the end of Ocean and the fertile shore; the hinterlands of Hades; the confluence of Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus into Acheron and rock) in a unified set. This sequence is dictated by a narrative framework, one in which movement through space in time imparts a specific order to the sequences: (first, depart from here), then, when (ὁπότε) you have crossed the ocean you will find a thickly wooded shore, then from there go to the rock/confluence of Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus; then … etc.Footnote 69
We may, however, note two important points, one concerning the level of rhetorical schemata, the other the level of types of dependence. At the level of rhetorical schemata, we have seen that it is movement through space in time that imparts the specific shape to the order of the items sequenced by the hodos as catalogic discourse. But this example urges us to take proper account of the fact that this is movement through space in time, and to pinpoint the ways this spatial dimension exerts its own influence on the possibilities for ordering the items that make up the catalogue of a hodos-itinerary. In the hodos to the Underworld, the scarcity of any temporal indicators imposing a temporal sequence on the catalogue at the level of the text brings out the underlying order inherent in the enumerated items themselves. Not only are both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of the pattern by which the hodos orders its sequence distinct and irreducible one to the other, but this spatial dimension is topological: that is, we understand space here from the perspective of the spatially contiguous, rather than absolute Cartesian space.Footnote 70
Let us consolidate observations made so far at the level of rhetorical schemata. Crucially, the rhetorical schema of the hodos has a fundamental narrativity insofar as what it depicts are events or actions, and, characteristically, the sequence of these actions or events is significant. The order in which these events or actions are sequenced in turn depends on two parameters. The underlying geography of the space traversed – specifically, the contiguity of the places where events or actions occur – determines the matrix of possible combinations this sequence can take. Movement through this space in time in turn determines one sequence or imposes a clear shape and form on the set of possibilities determined by the underlying geography of the space traversed. That is, the hodos dictates a series insofar as, by adding a dimension of ordered temporal sequentiality, it generates what we might strategically call spatio-temporal con-sequence out of spatial contiguity.
At the surface level of discourse these features are reflected in a number of characteristic ways in the Homeric examples so far examined. First, the verbs linking the units ordered by the rhetorical schema of the hodos are in some combination of the aorist tense-aspect (as one would expect with events and actions), the imperative mood, and the second person. Second, the combinations of adverbs and particles indicate the progression of the text according to a sequential pattern (and, especially in the hodos described in Odyssey 1, a largely temporally determined sequence). But this is because, third, the progression of the text tracks the sequence of the underlying story, which is itself ordered according to a temporal progression through spatially contiguous locations.
The second major point, pertaining to the level of the ‘types of dependence’, is as follows. There is a subtle but significant shift between the items enumerated by Athena to Telemachus and those enumerated by Circe to Odysseus. In the first case, we found a series of place names – ‘Pylos’, ‘Sparta’ – marked out as entries by the lexical tags ἐς or -δε. In the hodos to Hades a similar tag, ἔνθα, designates ‘entries’ in the catalogue, too. This is quite important, given that toponyms seem hard to come by in the Underworld. In this wilderness bereft of proper names, some other means of designating a place must be found: a rock, a confluence of rivers, a grove.
Somewhere between the thickly wooded shore and Persephone’s grove (and the tall poplars, and the fruit-perishing willows), between the rock and Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus, we find ourselves edging away from narrative discourse towards descriptive discourse. This is not only because of the highly conspicuous substitution of the sequence of temporal adverbs πρῶτα, κεῖθεν, ἔπειτα by the tripartite anaphora of the primarily spatial adverb ἔνθα at lines 509, 513, 515;Footnote 71 the passage is equally rich with verbs in the omnitemporal present (ῥέουσιν, 513; ἐστιν, 514; along with unexpressed existential predicates at 509–10 and 515).
The second entry in Circe’s hodos-catalogue thus blossoms into a discursive mode fully marked by ‘high descriptivity’ characteristics. We find a series of pieces of information about what the story-world is like, a set of attributions that constitute subtheme-like items in relation to themes (theme ‘Cocytus’, subtheme ‘which is an off-break from the water of the Styx’), a listing of states of affairs that is the stock in trade of description and all the grammatical features that attend this function discussed above.
To recapitulate: even without any express signalling of the temporal dimension ordering the items sequenced by a hodos, the discursive mode governed by this hodos is still marked by a kind of narrativity thanks to the inherent significance of the temporal sequence of the events it encompasses. Second, it is not only this temporal dimension that defines the order in which the hodos sequences its items: the inherent geography and topology of the spatial items it enumerates plays a fundamental role in dictating the set of possible combinations that form the series of the ordered sequence of the hodos. Third, at the level of ‘types of dependence’, the ‘entry’ component of the catalogic framework creates a regular (in the sense of both ‘orderly’ and ‘repeated’) opportunity for interludes of descriptive discourse that present states of affairs, introduce objects and places and attribute qualities to them, and are marked by the linguistic features characteristic of description (spatial adverbs and verbs in the omnitemporal present, perfect, etc.).
3.2.4 Types of Dependence: Narrative Episodes Tied to Places
One final point must be addressed before moving to the more consequential of Circe’s two hodoi. Continuing with the passage above, we find (Od. 10.513–20):
While it is interesting to note how the ‘tag’ ἔνθα is used at line 515 to make the pivot from description-oriented discourse to narratively oriented discourse, the temporal adverb (μετέπειτα) and ordinal language (πρῶτα, τὸ τρίτον) clearly indicate the inherent significance of the ordering of events that is the hallmark of high-narrativity discourse. As we shall discuss at much greater length in the next chapter, the imperative mood here expresses the sequence of actions that constitute the narrative; this highly narrative level nested within a highly descriptive one, which is itself nested in the narratively sequenced catalogue of the hodos, often takes this verbal form in the Odyssey.Footnote 72 Furthermore, as the use of the imperative mood (in dashed underline), the use of the vocative, and the second person markers suggests, this level of discourse is used to convey instructions specifically pegged to the places that make up the catalogue entry and are described in the ensuing description section: we may therefore be more specific and call this level of dependence: ‘instruction’ (see Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 The figure of the hodos in Odyssey 10
3.3 Conclusions
The apparatus developed in the first section of this chapter (3.1) provided us with a toolkit to analyse key portions of the Odyssey where the figure of the hodos plays a key role in dictating the discursive architecture of a portion of the poem. As a form of catalogic discourse, the rhetorical schema of the hodos orders the entries that form it according to a distinctive sequence. The parameters governing the order of this sequence include both a spatial and a temporal dimension. Because the items that form entries in a hodos-catalogue are places (Section 3.2.2a), the spatial configuration of the places to be catalogued dictates the possible sequence in which they can be arranged on the basis of their geographical contiguity (Section 3.2.2b); on the other hand, in the hodoi we have seen enumerated in Odyssey 1 and Odyssey 10, the fundamentally narrative dimension of the human movement from place to place imparts a clear temporal order to the sequence of places catalogued; it configures what we have termed spatio-temporal con-sequence from spatial contiguity (Section 3.2.2c). This narrativity also gave the catalogue produced by the rhetorical schema of the hodos the quality of a series: the order of the places matters.
The example of the hodos through the Underworld enumerated by Circe in Odyssey 10 also reveals key features of a possible type of dependence governed by the rhetorical schema of the hodos. As we have seen, much as in the A-B-C pattern scholars have discerned in the Catalogue of Ships, the narrative frame of the catalogue provides an opportunity for portions of description to depend from each entry (3.2.3), and for portions of narrativity (in this case, instructions) to further depend from these descriptions (3.2.4).
With this basic structure of the rhetorical schema of the hodos and the types of dependence it can dictate in mind, it is now time to examine the second hodos that Circe spells out for Odysseus: the itinerary in Odyssey 12 that runs from her island of Aeaea and goes to Thrinacia, where the Sun pastures his cattle.
4.1 Odyssey 12: Rhetorical Schema of the hodos
4.1.1 Rhetorical Schema of the hodos
What does the analysis set out in the previous chapter mean for Circe’s second hodos, the one she details in Odyssey 12? The overarching task of this chapter will be to analyse Od. 12.39–141 using the tools introduced and the framework developed in the Chapter 3.
The dramatic scenario in which Circe spells out this hodos is well-known. Odysseus has returned from the Underworld to attend to the bones of the hapless Elpenor. But he is also, from a narrative perspective, still empty-handed; Tiresias has not in fact provided the directions home that Odysseus needs, and it therefore falls to Circe to designate the actual itinerary of his journey home.Footnote 1 She greets the returning voyagers with characteristic hospitality, and then, dispatching the ship’s crew, pledges to Odysseus: ‘I shall indicate the hodos and sign out each [of the road-marks]’ (αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ δείξω ὁδὸν ἠδὲ ἕκαστα σημανέω, Od. 12.25–26).Footnote 2 With a minimum of preliminaries, she then launches into the business of doing just this.
In fact, in the catalogic discourse that follows (Od. 12.27–141), we find precisely what our study of the hodos enumerated by Athena to Telemachus in Odyssey 1 would lead us to expect. There, we saw that: (a) the temporal adverbs and particle combinations πρῶτα μὲν … κεῖθεν δὲ … δὴ ἔπειτα enumerated entries in the catalogue of the hodos-itinerary; (b) the sequence of this discursive enumeration tracked the underlying movement in the story-world from destination to destination to be undertaken in the future by Telemachus; (c) the destinations themselves were marked by the lexical items -δε and εἰς; and (d) the events that made up the core of the narrative were expressed in verbs in the aorist, often in the imperative mood (and in the second person). What we find in Odyssey 12 is fundamentally the same constellation of features, though with a few small modifications; for example, the second person imperatives have been replaced by second person futures. Circe begins (Od. 12.39):
And introduces the Cattle of the Sun (Od. 12.127):
Between these moments, a section introduced by the following lines intervenes immediately after the Sirens episode ends (Od. 12.55–58):
Here, too, the textual progression along temporal lines is marked through the cluster αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν δή. The sequence of the textual progression and the sequence of places to be visited in the voyage are correlated with the story-world that Circe narrates to Odysseus: the ‘what place comes next on the hodos’ (ἔνθα) is coordinated with the ‘what comes next in the narration’ (ἔπειτα διηνεκέως ἀγορεύσω).
This is as we would expect from the rhetorical schema governed by the figure of the hodos. We will in due course be able to examine the portion where Circe presents the choice. First, however, and by way of clarifying the patterns that define the other two discursive units (which will then give us a framework for examining the portion where the choice can be found), we will move to the level of types of dependence to examine how the discursive units marked out by this constellation of adverb and particle clusters, tense-aspect-mood-person configurations, and the relationship between narrated movement through space and discursive patterning are organized internally: that is, at the level of dependence.
4.1.2 Levels of Dependence
4.1.2.1 The Sirens and Thrinacia
As expected, a brief narrative link (Od. 12.39a, 12.127a) connecting catalogue entries creates a frame from which first description (Od. 12.39b–46, 127b–36), then further narration (in the form of instruction – Od. 12.47–54, 137–41) depend (see Table 4.1). It is these relations we will now examine at further length.
The first and last of these discourse-units are as follows (Od. 12.39–54, 127–41):
Table 4.1 Preliminary division of Od. 12.39–141 by discourse-unitsFootnote 3
| Sirens | Choice: Two Roads (and Two Rocks) | Cattle of the Sun | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lines | 39–54 | 55–126 | 127–41 |
Σειρῆνας μὲν πρῶτον ἀφίξεαι, αἵ ῥά τε πάντας ἀνθρώπους θέλγουσιν, ὅτις σφεας εἰσαφίκηται. ὅς τις ἀιδρείῃ πελάσῃ καὶ φθόγγον ἀκούσῃ Σειρήνων, τῷ δ᾽ οὔ τι γυνὴ καὶ νήπια τέκνα οἴκαδε νοστήσαντι παρίσταται οὐδὲ γάνυνται, ἀλλά τε Σειρῆνες λιγυρῇ θέλγουσιν ἀοιδῇ ἥμεναι ἐν λειμῶνι, πολὺς δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ ὀστεόφιν θὶς ἀνδρῶν πυθομένων, περὶ δὲ ῥινοὶ μινύθουσι. ἀλλὰ παρεξελάαν, ἐπὶ δ᾽ οὔατ᾽ ἀλεῖψαι ἑταίρων κηρὸν δεψήσας μελιηδέα, μή τις ἀκούσῃ τῶν ἄλλων· ἀτὰρ αὐτὸς ἀκουέμεν αἴ κ᾽ ἐθέλῃσθα, δησάντων σ᾽ ἐν νηὶ θοῇ χεῖράς τε πόδας τε ὀρθὸν ἐν ἱστοπέδῃ, ἐκ δ᾽ αὐτοῦ πείρατ᾽ ἀνήφθω, ὄφρα κε τερπόμενος ὄπ᾽ ἀκούσῃς Σειρήνοιιν. εἰ δέ κε λίσσηαι ἑτάρους λῦσαί τε κελεύῃς, οἱ δέ σ᾽ ἔτι πλεόνεσσι τότ᾽ ἐν δεσμοῖσι διδέντων. |
Θρινακίην δ᾽ ἐς νῆσον ἀφίξεαι· ἔνθα δὲ πολλαὶ βόσκοντ᾽ Ἠελίοιο βόες καὶ ἴφια μῆλα, ἑπτὰ βοῶν ἀγέλαι, τόσα δ᾽ οἰῶν πώεα καλά, πεντήκοντα δ᾽ ἕκαστα. γόνος δ᾽ οὐ γίγνεται αὐτῶν, οὐδέ ποτε φθινύθουσι. θεαὶ δ᾽ ἐπιποιμένες εἰσίν, νύμφαι ἐυπλόκαμοι, Φαέθουσά τε Λαμπετίη τε, ἃς τέκεν Ἠελίῳ Ὑπερίονι δῖα Νέαιρα. τὰς μὲν ἄρα θρέψασα τεκοῦσά τε πότνια μήτηρ Θρινακίην ἐς νῆσον ἀπῴκισε τηλόθι ναίειν, μῆλα φυλασσέμεναι πατρώια καὶ ἕλικας βοῦς. τὰς εἰ μέν κ᾽ ἀσινέας ἐάᾳς νόστου τε μέδηαι, ἦ τ᾽ ἂν ἔτ᾽ εἰς Ἰθάκην κακά περ πάσχοντες ἵκοισθε· εἰ δέ κε σίνηαι, τότε τοι τεκμαίρομ᾽ ὄλεθρον, νηί τε καὶ ἑτάροις· αὐτὸς δ᾽ εἴ πέρ κεν ἀλύξῃς, ὀψὲ κακῶς νεῖαι, ὀλέσας ἄπο πάντας ἑταίρους. |
|
First you will reach the Sirens, who charm all Men, whoever happens to approach them. And whosoever draws near to them in ignorance and hears the voice Of the Sirens, neither this man’s wife nor his little children Will be at hand, delighted, as he returns home; But the Sirens, enchanting him with their clear song, Wait in their meadow, and there is a great heap of men Rotting on their bonesFootnote 4 as the skin withers around them. But give a wide berth as you sail past, and anoint the ears of your crewmates With beeswax kneaded soft, in order that none Of them hear the singing. But should you yourself wish to hear it, Let them bind you hand and foot upright on the mast Of the swift ship, the ropes made fast to the beam, So that you may delight in hearing the voice of the Sirens. And if you plead with your men, command them to untie you, Let them bind you yet tighter still. |
Then you will reach the island Thrinacia: and there the many Cattle and sleek sheep of Helios pasture. Seven herds of oxen, and as many fine flocks of sheep, With fifty creatures in each herd. There is no begetting among them, Nor do they ever perish. Their shepherds are goddesses, Nymphs with beautiful braids, Phaëthousa and Lampetie, Whom heavenly Neaera bore to Helios Hyperion. Having given birth to them and raised them, their lordly mother Sent them to the island Thrinacia to dwell far away And guard their father’s sheep and cattle with curved horns. If you leave the cattle unharmed and keep your nostos in mind, You may all yet make it to Ithaca, despite suffering ills. But if you harm them, in that case I foresee destruction For ship and crew; and even if you yourself survive, You will return late and in bad condition, having destroyed all your companions. |
As expected, textual features characteristic of description are on abundant display in Od. 12.39b–46 and 127b–36: verbs are in the timeless/omnitemporal present indicative and in the third person (θέλγουσιν at 40 and 44, μινύθουσι at 46, βόσκοντο at 128, γίγνεται at 130, φθινύθουσι and εἰσίν at 131) or (stative) perfect (ἥμεναι at 45); the spatial adverb ἔνθα opens the descriptive portion at Od. 12.127; motion through the story-world (i.e. the future motion through it that Circe foretells) ‘stops’; the ‘statics of the world’ – states of affairs and enduring properties – are presented, and qualities and properties attributed to objects and places.
Similarly, in lines 12.47–54 and 12.137–41, we find again what we would expect to find at this level of dependence; just as in Odyssey 10, Circe follows descriptions of the places that form the hodos with instructions about what to do there. Accordingly, we find several verbs in the imperative or (especially where conditional clauses are concerned) in the subjunctive or optative; similarly, these instruction sections feature verbs in the second person, rather than the third person of description sections.
In order to analyse these sections better, it will be useful to proceed by way of a very brief detour through scholarship concerning Homeric deliberation. In a major study of this and related topics, Christopher Gill highlights three features that are characteristic of Homeric deliberation.Footnote 5 First, Homeric deliberation often involves ‘working out the implications of different courses of action’.Footnote 6 Second, this working out of implications involves a process by which an actor ‘first entertains and then rejects a certain course of action; and the rejection is a crucial preliminary to the reaching of a conclusion’.Footnote 7 Third, these courses of action are often ‘evaluate[d] … in light of explicit or implied goals’ or in relation to a general rule;Footnote 8 so the thought pattern often adheres to the following form: ‘if I do x, then y will happen, and this involves z, which is bad or good.’Footnote 9 Rachel Knudsen has identified two further features of Homeric deliberation: first, the conclusion of a chain of inferences often takes the form of an imperative or some other kind of instruction (something concerning actions, that is, rather than states of affairs); and, second, these conclusions often come first and are linked to the supporting premises, which come after, by gar or epei.Footnote 10
Returning to the Sirens, two points may be established. First, that Circe does not merely provide a set of detailed instructions for Odysseus (in the form of the imperatives); instead, she persistently justifies them by embedding them in a purposive or explanatory framework. The means by which she does so are grammatical: the purpose clause and the conditional construction.Footnote 11 Thus Circe’s imperative: οὔατ᾽ ἀλεῖψαι ἑταίρων (Od. 12.47) is not expressed as some kind of divine injunction imposed from above; rather, she supplies a rationale in the form of the negative purpose clause: μή τις ἀκούσῃ | τῶν ἄλλων (Od. 12.48–49). As Knudsen suggests, it is the conclusion, expressed in the form of an imperative to an action, which comes first; as Gill leads us to expect, it is by virtue of thinking through (a) the implications of a course of action (b) in reference to a particular goal or end that each imperative is justified. So, too, her final instructions for Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens – οἱ δέ σ᾽ ἔτι πλεόνεσσι τότ᾽ ἐν δεσμοῖσι διδέντων (Od. 12.54) – forms the apodosis of a conditional clause: if you plead with your companions to release you, then let them bind you tighter still. In the first instance, Circe establishes the explanatory relationship between her instructions and the rationale behind them in the form of a purpose clause: her instructions (anointing the ears of Odysseus’ crew) represent a good way to achieve a particular outcome (preventing them from hearing the Sirens’ song and, ultimately, being seduced by it). In the second, she uses a conditional clause to articulate something akin to a causal relationship: an effect to be triggered in the event that a given condition is met. We even see a chain of explanatory argument evolve in the linkage between the two (12.49–52): Circe locates her instruction in the apodosis of a conditional clause, and this apodosis triggers its own purpose clause – if what you want is to hear the Sirens, have your men bind you to the mast in order to hear the song of the Sirens and take delight in it (without being fatally waylaid by their seductive song).
The second point is that if it seems natural, even obvious, that Circe should account for her instructions to Odysseus, the first hodos she details (in Odyssey 10) suggests otherwise. There she outlines a series of places Odysseus will need to pass through en route to Hades, giving a detailed series of instructions about what to do when he has arrived at the rock where Acheron receives its tributaries. Those instructions, however, are simply instructions (Od. 10.516–25):
Indicators, syntactical or semantic, articulating explanatory, purposive, or intentional relationships justifying these instructions are completely absent: Odysseus is simply supposed to do the things she tells him to do. The contrast between these two ‘instruction’ segments depending from the ‘description’ sections (the first bare instructions, the second embedded within a framework of inferential justification) suggests we might do well to call this section not only ‘instruction’ (as does de Jong), but even ‘justified instruction’ – or even, according to the terminology set out in Section 3.1.2, ‘argument’.
The Thrinacia episode develops this penchant for examination and explanation. Recall Gill’s observation that in Homeric deliberation, the deliberating character often ‘entertains and then rejects a certain course of action; and the rejection is a crucial preliminary to the reaching of a conclusion’.Footnote 12 Common to Od. 12.47–54 and 12.137–41 is the use of conditional clauses, though the differences between them in the Sirens episode and those related to Thrinacia are striking. In the first case, the conditional sentences are geared towards attaining a certain set of outcomes – to hear the Sirens and not be destroyed by doing so. By contrast, the three conditional clauses in the Thrinacia episode examine the terms and consequences of a single choice. Two mutually exclusive possibilities are presented: either Odysseus and his men can leave the cattle unharmed, or they can harm the cattle – plainly they cannot both harm and not harm the same cattle (the point is driven home by the binary pair ἀσινέας/σίνηαι, 12.137, 139).Footnote 13 What is more, these choices are presented as exhaustive: these two options are plainly the only two conceivable options. In the first case the outcome is clear: nostos for all. Not so the second case; again deploying the framework of the conditional clause, Circe examines two possible consequences resulting from the second course of action. That Odysseus’ men will perish and his ship will be destroyed is expressed unequivocally (τεκμαίρομαι),Footnote 14 but ‘even if’ (εἰ … κεν …) Odysseus happens to survive, he will be much delayed and will return in grievous circumstances (139–41). And although Circe does not explicitly reject one of the two courses of action, the way in which she establishes the implications of each strongly suggests the undesirability of one – ‘a crucial preliminary to the reaching of a conclusion’.Footnote 15
4.1.2.2 Levels of Dependence in Odyssey 12: The Relationship between ‘Description’ and ‘Instruction’/‘Argument’
We see, then, that the two ‘description’ passages fulfil two of the basic roles the study of narrative has typically assigned to description: to introduce the places, objects, characters, and so forth that are to feature in a given narrative segment,Footnote 16 and to make this world and its components vivid.Footnote 17 This pair of functions is particularly vital at this stage in the narrative, located as we are in the fantasy world of the Apologoi. Since Pylos and Sparta, Nestor and Menelaus need rather a different introduction from, say, the Sirens, the scenario is quite different from what we saw in Odyssey 1;Footnote 18 in the fantasy world of the Apologoi,Footnote 19 a world must be formed anew each time the next island-episode appears on the horizon, its story-universe invented and peopled with characters, filled with objects. The two ‘instruction’ or ‘argument’ subsets of the Siren and Thrinacia episodes, meanwhile, reveal a persistent tendency on the part of the goddess to justify or provide explanations for the instructions she offers, and an interest in examining the relationship between action and outcome, decision and consequence.
With this in mind, we may propose the following relationship between Od. 12.39b–46 and 12.47–54, and 12.127b–36 and 12.137–41, respectively. The descriptive passages each (a) introduce the setting and dramatis personae, then (b) hone in immediately on the most pertinent details, which (c) are examined through a kind of embedded narrative that directly or indirectly sets up the ‘instruction/argument’ passages that follow.Footnote 20 Particularly deft in this last respect is the failed nostos Circe presents in miniature in the Sirens episode. She does this through the syntactical resource of the indefinite general relative clause (hos tis, Od. 12.41–43), which allows her to set out one of the two key considerations to be negotiated in the following ‘instruction’: that the Sirens’ song is so seductive that it prevents passing sailors from fulfilling their nostoi and rejoining their wives and children. In the Thrinacia episode, this means introducing the cattle, adumbrating their number,Footnote 21 their extraordinary qualities (Od. 12.130–32), and the degree to which the Sun god cares about them (Od. 12.132–36).
This judicious dispensation of details laying the groundwork for narration to come might simply be thought a mark of good story-telling. Richardson writes: ‘Homer is not interested so much in the object of the description as he is in its effect on the particular scene, and he therefore feels no need to describe the setting for its own sake but only on those occasions when it matters.’Footnote 22 But this narrative strategy should not be taken for granted. As we saw in the case of Circe’s first hodos, instructions issued by the goddess, however vital, need not necessarily be preceded by much in the way of preparatory description; just because a place or object ‘matters’, that is, does not guarantee that it will be presented to the audience prior to ‘mattering’. In the episodes that bookend Circe’s second hodos, however, her instructions and the justification she provides for them are scrupulously anticipated by details introduced in the preceding descriptive sections.
If details that matter need not necessarily be introduced but are in Od. 12.39–46 and 12.127–36, Richardson’s general formulation does only partial justice to the sophisticated use to which the details that ‘matter’ are put in the instruction/argument sections of Od. 12.47–54 and 12.137–41. Details are not introduced in the first sections merely to make a brief cameo in the second before Circe moves on; rather, they are carefully placed in an intentional and purposive framework, or examined in terms of their modality and the matrix of possible consequences that can issue from them. Circe does not simply say ‘put wax in your men’s ears and have them tie you to the mast’ as she does ‘dig a pit of so many cubits, perform this ritual in this sequence, make such and such a vow’ (Od. 10.516–25). Instead, in her instructions to act a certain way, Circe explicitly addresses the question, ‘Why?’, and her discourse, teeming with purpose and conditional clauses, bears the mark of this rationalization.Footnote 23
We may summarize the type of dependence between the description and instruction/argument sections in the following way. In the episode of the Sirens and of Thrinacia, Circe’s descriptive sections serve both to create a world within which the narrative actions are located and to anchor this world in a sense of reality; they also hone in on specific elements of this world that are often of direct significance for the instructions that follow on from them; and, finally, these details serve as the evidence that provides a basis for the instructions issued, and upon which they are justified (or create a consequential framework surrounding the different stances Odysseus and his men might take in relation to them). These observations will also provide a useful starting point for an examination of the intervening passages, in which the Planctae, Scylla, and Charybdis feature.
4.2 Krisis
4.2.1 Rhetorical Schemata
If analysing Od. 12.39–54 and 12.127–41 can be done rather neatly, how best to analyse the different units that make up Od. 12.55–126 is more challenging. De Jong’s commentary, generally a reliable starting point, is misleading or inaccurate in a number of ways when it comes to this passage. For example, lines 12.108–10 and 124–26 are inexplicably assigned to Charybdis, not Scylla; the first half of line 12.73 addresses not only Scylla, but both Scylla and Charybdis; lines 12.81b–82 are plainly not descriptive.Footnote 24 One suspects that these uncharacteristic inaccuracies stem from de Jong’s decision to use the individual characters or places – viz. the Sirens, the Planctae, Scylla, Charybdis, Thrinacia – as the base units (‘episodes’) of her analysis. While this is appropriate for the Sirens (12.39–54) and Thrinacia (12.127–41), where the segmentation of the text (that is, of the narrative or plot) corresponds to the discrete places where Odysseus will arrive, in lines 12.55–126 something else is going on.
Figure 4.1 Preliminary analysis: Discursive organization governed by the figure of the hodos in Odyssey 12
As noted, Od. 12.55–58 fits the model of ‘prior narration’, the top unit in the levels of dependence:
Two recent studies on autar and autar + epei/epeita/epēn have made clear how these clusters of what are traditionally classed as particles and conjunctions are better understood as discourse markers that help speakers organize their discourse by parcelling it into distinct units.Footnote 25 Applying their findings to this portion of the Odyssey, we may say that αὐτὰρ ἐπήν would here mark the beginning of a new narration section. Similarly, we find typical markers of narrative activity, including three verbs in the future indicative ἀγορεύσω, ἐρέω, and ἔσσεται.Footnote 26 The cluster ἔπειτα διηνεκέως also marks the progression of the text along temporal lines. All the features of narration discussed above are in play here.
By contrast, very few of these narrative elements are found in 12.59–126. Instead, we find extensive stretches of description (to be examined shortly) introduced by the portentous phrase (Od. 12.57–58):
These two hodoi, both of which she promises to enumerate, in fact introduce what amounts to 47.5 lines (12.59–106a) of description; verbs in this portion of the text overwhelmingly take the omnitemporal present, and nearly all the adverbs used are spatial (e.g. enthen at 12.59; entha at 12.85; tēi [‘past there’] at 12.62, 12.66; tōi [‘in that place’] at 12.103, 12.104). The text proceeds along largely spatial lines, with little movement in ‘story’ time (barring one important exception, which we shall note shortly).Footnote 27 The function of these portions is clearly to introduce elements of the story-world and attribute qualities and attributes to them.
One major exception is a curiously ambiguous line and a half of plainly narrative language occurring at 12.81b–82, just after the first of the ‘two rocks’ (viz. Scylla’s rock) is introduced (Od. 12.80–82):
As the commentators note, ἰθύνετε is an aorist subjunctive; when combined with the ἄν in the environment of a prophecy, this has the force of something approaching a command.Footnote 29
What are we to make of this? Lines 81b–82 (ᾗ … Ὀδυσσεῦ) plainly cannot be designated as descriptive (as de Jong would have it): the textual features are not those of description, neither establishing features of the narrative world nor attributing qualities to the characters that populate it. Depending on how one interprets the force of the subjunctive + an construction in the context of a prophecy, this could either be a prior narration section, which would introduce a new unit, or an instruction section, which would close off an old unit, according to the analysis we have been undertaking so far (see Figure 4.2 below). Perhaps in this setting, however, the ambiguity is useful. We might do well to see the clause that spans the two lines as doing double duty: as instruction, it closes off the section that, as we shall see, details a choice between the two ‘routes’, while as prior narration it opens a new kind of textual or discursive unit in which the two creatures, Scylla and Charybdis, are presented in high-descriptivity passages followed by instruction/argument (12.106b–10) concerning how best to address them.
A version of de Jong’s schema modified to take these points into account might look like Table 4.2. On this reading, we can identify three possible units of analysis. The first would be discursive units, units of discourse parcelled out or marked off as discrete items by discourse markers on the surface of the text (clusters of adverbs and particles, here in combination with prior narration introducing the new unit and following a section of instruction closing the old units); these would be distinctions made at the level of discourseFootnote 30 and would here be coextensive with entries in the catalogue of Circe’s hodos-itinerary (capitalized in Table 4.2). These units we may contrast with what we may still, following convention, call episodes, which would correspond to all the locations Circe mentions, regardless of whether she actually instructs Odysseus to visit them;Footnote 31 these episodes may revolve around particular characters (e.g. the Sirens) but they are ultimately tied to specific places (which number five, underlined in Table 4.2, and would include the Planctae and Charybdis (rejected by Circe)). Finally, we can identify a third category between these two, what we might call a ‘hodos-unit’, which marks out a distinct node in the itinerary (based on the analysis of the level of dependence undertaken so far) that makes up the hodos enumerated in the catalogic discourse of Circe’s prophecy. This level may be seen to bridge the underlying story-world and the level of discourse by capturing the way elements in the story-world are organized by discourse (these number four, in boldface in Table 4.2).
Table 4.2 Preliminary analysis of Od. 12.39–141
| Unit | Discourse mode | Lines |
|---|---|---|
| SIRENS | Prior Narration (PN) | 39a (‘you will first come to’) |
| Description | 39b–46 (epic te in 39 and 44) | |
| Argument | 47–54 (imperatival infinitives in 47, bis) | |
| CHOICE | PN | 55–57a (‘I cannot tell you what your way will be’) |
| Choice 1 | Instruction | 57b–58 (imperatival infinitive in 58) |
| Planctae | Description | 59–72 (epic te in 62, 64) |
| Two Rocks | Description | 73a |
| Scylla | Description | 73b–81a |
| Choice 2/Scylla | Instruction(/PN) | 81b–82 |
| Scylla | Description | 83–100 |
| Charybdis | PN | 101 (‘you will see’) |
| Description | 101–06a | |
| Two Rocks | Argument | 106b–110 |
| (Scylla 2) | Description | 118–20 (epic te in 90, 93, 99) |
| Argument/PN | 121–26 | |
| THRINACIA | PN | 127a (‘you will come to’) |
| Description | 127b–136 | |
| Argument + PN | 137–41 (‘if you do A, then you might/will …’) |
All caps = discourse-unit; bold = hodos-unit; underlined = episode.
It is this level of analysis, the hodos-unit (see Table 4.3), that will provide the basis for the following discussion; breaking things down in this fashion allows us to glean a better insight into the two passages where choices are presented (12.57–82; 81–110, 115–26) and, by helping us better discern the shape of Circe’s hodos, help us better analyse the discursive dynamics through which it is expressed. How, then, does this work in practice?
As we have seen, Circe disclaims the ability to instruct Odysseus, telling him she will present two options between which he must choose (12.57–58):
The first of these two (and both ὁπποτέρη and ἀμφοτέρωθεν underscore the duality of the choice) is presented by lines beginning ἔνθεν μὲν γὰρFootnote 32 πέτραι ἐπηρεφέες (‘There on the one hand [are] steep rocks’, 12.59). Notable is the spatial preposition enthen and the particle men, which open the door to an extended description of these steep rocks (12.59–72). The men is matched by the corresponding οἱ δὲ δύω σκόπελοι (‘And on the other [are] the two rocks’, 12.73), which in turn heads another portion of description (12.73–81a) where the first of these rocks is presented.
Scrupulous symmetries characterize the two items presented in the harmonized balance of the men … de … clauses, as Hopman puts it:
Circe’s prophecy clearly constructs the Planctae and the straits of Scylla and Charybdis as parallel dangers. Both involve a narrow path located between cliffs made of smooth stone (petrai, 12.59, lis petrē, 12.64 [Planctae]; petrē … lis, 12.79 [Scylla]). Amphitrite, who otherwise appears only twice in the Odyssey (3.91 and 5.422), is mentioned in relation to both the Planctae and Scylla (12.60 and 97). Finally … a similar ‘description by negation technique’ is used to describe both hazards. Just as no dove would be able to go through the Planctae, not even a great archer could reach Scylla’s cave with his arrows (12.62–4 and 12.83–84) … in Circe’s speech, therefore, the Planctae are structurally and thematically comparable to the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis.Footnote 33
In Bakker’s view, as a general matter in Homer, the use of men ensures that the option introduced by the de clause is ‘framed’ in relation to the option in the men clause.Footnote 34 This ‘framing’ need not set up an antithetical relationship: ‘[a] speaker using men, looking forward to an upcoming statement with de, does not so much presuppose a common basis for conducting discourse as establish one’.Footnote 35
Whereas units of discourse are mapped onto places one-to-one in the Sirens and Thrinacia episodes, in the course of the hodos-unit formed by the narration-description-instruction section spanning lines 12.57–82 we find two different geographic units, the Planctae and the Two Rocks. They are not introduced at the level of the narrative frame (the top level of dependence), but rather form two different entries placed in parallel at the second level of dependence, that of description.
Precisely the same dynamics are to be found in the course of lines Od. 12.73–106a, which relate Scylla and Charybdis to each other and describe them. The two are presented through a men … de … framing device (for Scylla’s rock: ὁ μὲν οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἱκάνει | ὀξείῃ κορυφῇ at 12.73–74; for Charybdis: τὸν δ᾽ ἕτερον σκόπελον χθαμαλώτερον at 12.101)Footnote 36 at the level of description rather than narration.Footnote 37 What follows (Od. 12.73b–81a, 12.83–106a) is an extended description addressing the first option and then the second, the details of which are closely coordinated.Footnote 38 There is also one final point: an advantage of this line of analysis is that the hodos-units do not map one-to-one onto ‘episodes’; as the confusion surrounding lines 73–81a make clear, it is entirely possible for one discrete place or character – Scylla and her rock, in this case – to be split across two different hodos-units in a way that analysing by episode does not allow for.
By way of linking the foregoing discussion to existing scholarship on ancient Greek thought, and also to pinpointing what makes this portion of the Odyssey distinctive, it is helpful to discuss these points in light of the Homeric phenomenon that Geoffrey Lloyd termed ‘polar expressions’, with which the relationship between the Planctae and the Two Rocks, and between Scylla and Charybdis, may seem to have much in common.Footnote 39 As Lloyd emphasizes, however, the unit that forms one half of a ‘polar expression’ can also often be paired with other units to form a ‘polar expression’ along a different axis; so, for example, ‘openly’ can be contrasted with either ‘secretly’ (ἢ ἀμφαδὸν ἦε κρυφηδόν, Od. 14.330) or ‘by trickery’ (ἠὲ δόλῳ ἢ ἀμφαδόν, Od. 1.296).Footnote 40 Furthermore, these polar opposites often admit of a third, intermediate option (or even a gradation of intermediate options): so soldiers need not be only either brave or cowardly, but can also be somewhere in between (μεσήεις, Il. 12.269).Footnote 41 By contrast, however, and very importantly, neither hodos of the two paired by Circe admit of another contrary to be substituted, as with ‘openly/hidden’ and ‘openly/secretly’. No ‘third hodos’ is presented – nor does the possibility seem conceivable, unless one can rewrite the geography of the story-world. It is not only that one cannot travel both routes at the same time; it is also simply that, as presented, there do not exist any other possible routes if one wants to get from the Sirens’ Meadow to Thrinacia. That the two hodoi are part of the physical space of the story-world is central not only to their mutual exclusiveness but also, that is, to the exhaustive nature of the dichotomy they form; as a convenient shorthand, we may also refer to this phenomenon of the exclusive exhaustive disjunction (where one cannot choose both options, or neither, but must choose one) between the two paths of a forked road as a krisis. The krisis will be a feature of enormous importance in Parmenides’ poem.
With this analysis in hand, we can now identify a second kind of operation in the syntax of the hodos as a form of catalogic discourse. The focus has been on the ordered sequentiality according to which items form entries in the series of the catalogic discourse organized by the figure of the hodos (see Table 4.4a, b, c). In the exclusive disjunction or krisis, we see a second possible relationship that can obtain between two items of a hodos-itinerary within one unit of hodos-discourse, one that relates these two items in the story-world at the level of description, not narration.
Table 4.4a Organization by (possible) episodes (after de Jong)
| Sirens | Planctae | Scylla | Charybdis | Thrinacia | ? | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prior Narration | 39a | – | – | 101 | 127a | 55–57a, 81b–82? |
| Description | 39b–46 | 59–72 | 73b–81a, 83–100, 118–20 | 101–106a | 127b–136 | 73a |
| Instruction/Argument | 47–54 | – | – | 106b–110, 121–26 | 137–41 | 57b–58?, 81b–82? |
Table 4.4b Organization by discourse-units/episodes visited
| SIRENS CHOICE | THR. | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (Two Roads) | Planct. | Two Rocks | (Two Rocks) | Scylla | Charyb. | |||
| PN | 39a | 55–57a | – | – | 81b–82 | – | 101 | 127a |
| Desc. | 39b–46 | – | 59–72 | 73a (both), 73b–100 (first rock) | – | (73b–81a), 83–100, 118–20 | 101–106a | 127b–136 |
| Inst. | 47–54 | 57b–58, 81b–82 | – | – | 106b–110, 121–26 | – | – | 137–41 |
All caps = discourse-unit; bold = hodos-unit; underlined = place visited; strike through = place not visited.
Table 4.4c Organization by hodos-units
| Sirens | Two Roads | (Planct.) | (Two Rocks) | Two Rocks | (Scylla) | (Ch.) | Thrin. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PN | 39a | 55–57a | – | – | 81b–82 | – | 101 | 127a |
| Desc. | 39b–46 | – | 59–72 | 73a (both), 73b–100 (first rock) | – | (73b–81a), 83–100, 118–20 | 101–106a | 127b–136 |
| Inst. | 47–54 | 57b–58, 81b–82 | – | – | 106b–110, 121–26 | – | – | 137–41 |
4.2.2 Types of Dependence: Description and Argument in the krisis Section
This has implications at the level of types of dependence for sections of text that depend from the entries that make up the catalogue of the hodos. Compared to Od. 12.39–54 and 12.127–41, however, the dynamics of lines Od. 12.55–126 are subtly but critically distinct. Since in lines 12.55–126 it is the places themselves – as opposed to actions (e.g. to kill or not to kill the Cattle of the Sun) – that form the possible choices in question, in the scenario of the krisis it is the nature of the places themselves (as opposed to the actions one can or cannot perform there) that now commands the narrator’s attention. The places themselves must be adequately described in order that a choice between them may be made. As a result, in lines Od. 59–126, description predominates to a far greater extent than in other sections: in the Sirens episode the portions are virtually even (7.5 lines of description to 8 lines of argument), while in the Thrinacia episode we find a description to argument ratio of nearly 2:1 (9.5 lines to 5) – between lines 12.59 and 126, however, the ratio stands at nearly 6:1 (52 lines of description to 9 of instruction/argument).Footnote 42
This is significant, especially given the view that oral poetry is good at, and its linguistic resources designed for, ‘describ[ing] the acts of persons and the happening of events’, but offers few means of examining the world beyond ‘verbs of doing and acting and happening’.Footnote 43 On this view, even when the language of oral poetry is mobilized to gain purchase on ‘the nature of the outside world’, its orientation towards the expression of actions and events inclines it strongly towards doing so ‘in diachronic terms, as history rather than as philosophy or science’.Footnote 44
The encounter with the Sirens and the passage by way of Thrinacia are, for geographical reasons, simply givens. Circe flatly declares that Odysseus ‘will first reach the Sirens’ (12.39). This certainty lets Circe get on straight away to ‘what matters’, which is what these Sirens do: they enchant (12.40). There is simply no need to further explore their underlying nature, their ontological status, their genealogy, their form (even their number).Footnote 45 Regarding Thrinacia, whether or not Odysseus and his men make land there is partly what is at stake in Tiresias’ prophecy in book 11. Circe elides the question, however, simply listing it as the next place Odysseus ‘will reach’ in the sequence of his travels; what ‘matters’ for Circe is the question of the cattle. The element of choice in this section perhaps accounts for the increased proportion of description relative to instruction: because what matters is the cattle (concerning whose fate there is to be a kind of choice), information about them – about their nature and their histories – is important. Not only is it what the cattle do that ‘matters’ here; what they are becomes more important.
This relationship between the introduction of a choice and the proliferation of description comes dramatically into view in the portion of Circe’s hodos presented by lines 12.59–126. Without the simple givenness that defines the encounters with the Sirens and Thrinacia (viz. that there would be an encounter with the Sirens or the Cattle of the Sun), the nature of the possible destinations in the hodos-itinerary are ‘what matter’. Accordingly, what we find is something akin to ‘describing the setting for its own sake’ here: what ‘matters’ is the very nature of the potential items making up Odysseus’ itinerary, and what will form the ‘argument’ sections is, in part, an argument about which of the two exclusive, exhaustive alternatives forming the krisis to select, and why. It is to some notable aspects of these description and argument sections, and to the relationship between the two, that we shall now turn.
4.2.2.1 Three Features: einai, Negation, epei and gar
4.2.2.1.1 Einai
As Chatman puts it, ‘if we were asked for the typical verb representing description, we would cite the copula’.Footnote 46 Today, this makes intuitive sense: if description is generally thought to deal with states of affairs rather than events (which would properly be the domain of narrative), one might expect the verb einai to be the key resource in addressing states of affairs. But this runs contrary to one influential understanding of the nature of oral poetics generally and Homeric strategies of description more specifically.Footnote 47 The Sirens episode provides a nice case in point. These seven lines of description, arguably among the most vivid and memorable in the Odyssey, pass by without a single appearance of the verb.Footnote 48 Likewise, the eleven-line description of Thrinacia has only a single use of the verb einai (the shepherdesses of the Sun’s flock are goddesses: θεαὶ δ᾽ ἐπιποιμένες εἰσίν, 12.131). As noted, the verbs in these passages emphasize doing and acting, not existing or being something or other.
It is entirely otherwise, however, in the interval between Circe’s treatments of the Sirens and Thrinacia. The third-person form of the verb einai occurs ten times in the course of sixty-three lines (eleven if we count an infinitive that would be in the third person were it in direct speech). What is more, six of these take the form of the third person singular indicative – all in forty-one lines. This represents among the densest concentration of such uses of esti in Homer (or indeed anywhere in the epic corpus).Footnote 49
We observed above that scholars have identified two major functions of description, namely introducing objects, items, and characters, and attributing qualities to them. As it happens, these functions correspond very neatly to two of the major grammatical functions that scholars have assigned to the verb einai in Greek.Footnote 50 Scylla’s cave, for example, is introduced by an ‘existential’ esti (Od. 12.80):Footnote 51
By contrast, a number of uses of einai in the third person indicative are predicative and attribute qualities to various objects. So Circe says of the first of two rocks, πέτρη γὰρ λίς ἐστι (‘For the rock is smooth’, Od. 12.79). Furthermore, this predicative use of einai ultimately takes on an evaluative dimension, as when Circe makes the following assertion (Od. 12.109–10):
In this section of Circe’s hodos, then, the verb einai is frequently used to perform both roles of description – introducing story elements with existential uses of einai, and attributing qualities to them with predicative uses – as well as helping to justify the imperatives that make up the ‘argument’ sections. In this passage of unusually lengthy and extensive description, and in the arguments that follow from these descriptions, we may simply observe that the verb einai appears with unusual, indeed almost unprecedented frequency, and that a full range of semantic facets offered by the verb einai is exploited at key steps in the description and argument sections.
4.2.2.1.2 Negation
If this is all merely suggestive in light of Parmenides’ subsequent use of einai, more immediately pertinent is the prevalence of the so-called ‘description-by-negation’ technique in the course of Od. 12.59–126. Of Odysseus’ introduction to the Cyclopes episode, one scholar has seen fit to write the following:
The passage … is remarkable for its sustained rhetorical discourse on the subject of nothing. It would be difficult to find in Homer, or indeed anywhere else in Greek, a passage of comparable length so richly sown with negatives as Od. 9.106–48. Perhaps only Plato’s Parmenides can equal it.Footnote 52
However true this may be for a passage a few dozen lines long, there is no portion of the passage cited by Austin that can compete with the description of Scylla’s rock provided at Od. 12.75–78 for sheer density of negatives. In these four lines we find seven negatives, while the final lines (Od. 12.117–23) devoted to describing Scylla boast a further five negatives.Footnote 53
De Jong writes of the description-by-negation technique that it ‘is employed to define things or conditions which are the reverse of normal, mortal existence’, and this is certainly true of the case at hand.Footnote 54 The introduction of Scylla’s rock is itself a sustained rhetorical discourse on what does not happen (but normally would) (Od. 12.73–76):
This meditation on what does not occur then gives way to a further discourse on what cannot occur (Od. 12.76–78):
Two points stand out. One is the increasing relevance to the story setting of the qualities attributed to Scylla’s rock through the ‘descriptions-by-negation’. The relationship between the rock’s peak and the clouds of summer paint a vivid picture; nor are the details irrelevant, since we will later learn that Scylla’s cave is about halfway up the crag. More germane to the dramatic situation than the height of the rock, however, is what a man who happens to pass by would or would not be able to do with or on it. Another way of making the point is that although they echo the famous invocation of the Muses in Iliad 2, the lines do not claim privileged access to knowledge guaranteeing the authority of what follows (as we have seen, such a claim would be otiose for Circe anyway), but rather serve to rule out, emphatically, the possibility of the action presented via negation being accomplshed successfully. In Iliad 2, the negations emphasize the extraordinary nature of what will happen; here, they make precisely the opposite point, underscoring with absolute certainty what will not, indeed cannot, happen.
The second feature of interest is the introduction of a modal valence to the description-by-negation, primarily through the modal particle ken (and emphasized with the counterfactual conditional ‘even if he had twenty hands and twenty feet’). The emphatic ‘even if’ technique occurs four times in the course of this phase in Circe’s hodos and – looking ahead to Parmenides’ commitment to description through an explicitly modally oriented examination of the possible (or rather, a declaration of the impossible) – is particularly striking.Footnote 55
Circe’s descriptions-by-negation grow ever more sharply pointed. Having introduced Scylla’s cave, she says (Od. 12.83–84):
This is a comment that will have a direct bearing on her exchange with Odysseus a few lines later (to be examined below). The κεν + optative construction is not her only way of investing her descriptions with a kind of modal charge, however. Before moving on to Charybdis, Circe’s description of Scylla culminates in an even more pointed, indeed poignant, set of descriptive negations. These, too will have an important bearing on the instructions Circe gives at 12.106–10 (Od. 12.98–99):
Here, Circe’s ‘descriptions-by-negation’ come via a categorical statement; the lines just examined have the force of ‘all who have passed by’, but the matter is framed empirically, and the general force – ‘all who [have ever passed or will ever] pass’ – left implicit.
Most striking of all, however, is Circe’s description of the route that goes via the Planctae (Od. 12.62–63, 66):
We are now in a position to see how much more is at stake in the negative descriptions Circe provides here: the force of this final pair of descriptions plainly lies not in the abnormality of these rocks, but in what their qualities and nature imply for the feasibility of the routes Odysseus can select (recalling that Circe frames this section as a choice Odysseus must make between two hodoi, Od. 12.57–58). In effect, this description-by-negation – no ship of men has yet made it through, and even things that fly, Zeus’s own bartenders, cannot – amounts to an implicit proscription by negation. Circe’s description effectively rejects this route as a viable option. We shall examine this point further below.
4.2.2.1.3 Gar and epei
But had not the Argo sailed between just these rocks?Footnote 56 Yes, but there were special circumstances in that case, Circe is careful to point out. So, having noted the Argo’s successful passage through this strait, she ends with the following counterfactual observation (Od. 12.71–72):
Here we find the third notable textual feature of the passage Od. 12.55–126: the explicit use of logically potent connectors such as epei and the particle gar to articulate a series of causal, inferential, explanatory, or justificatory relationships (relationships expressed by syntactical means in the other two episodes examined).Footnote 57 The clause filling out the second half of the line after the caesura (ἐπεὶ φίλος ἦεν Ἰήσων) is of great importance, both for Circe’s description of the Planctae and its implications for Odysseus. It emphasizes that the successful passage of the Argo through the Wandering Rocks says everything about the Argo (or rather its captain) and very little about the Wandering Rocks: the ship made it through, not because ships sometimes do, but because the queen of the gods went to exceptional lengths on account of philia. Epei introduces an implicit paradigm or analogy (not unlike the general relative clause in the description of the Sirens) that also operates by negation; the lines prompt the question, ‘Are we, too, dear to Hera’? If this term in the analogy does not fit, Jason’s paradigm is inapplicable: the Planctae are impassable for anyone not granted special favours by Hera – and this includes Odysseus, of course.
Epei is here deployed in its most prototypically causal sense (establishing a ‘real-world’ causal relationship between two states of affairs, viz. Hera’s love caused the Argo not to be smashed)Footnote 58 with the third person singular indicative form of einai used in its predicative sense.Footnote 59 This would extend the explanatory tendencies noted in the instruction section of the Sirens (and of Thrinacia). As we saw, in the hodos she narrated in Odyssey 10, Circe does not develop her instructions through any additional explanatory or justificatory support or elaboration; instead, she simply dictates them to her mortal ward. In the Sirens and Thrinacia portions of the hodos in Odyssey 12, Circe raises questions of cause, effect, and consequentiality. Here, however, she goes even further: she highlights the causal relations in play by using epei; does so by linking two assertions concerning states of affairs (the smashing of the Argo, Hera’s love for Jason), rather than linking an illocutionary utterance like an instruction, suggestion, or command; and, moreover, anchors her claim in a fundamental fact of ‘what is’ in the world.Footnote 60
With this in mind, consider again Od. 12.77–79:
With a glance forward to Parmenides, we should observe how the modally oriented examination of what would or would not be possible (under not only the present circumstances but also hypothetically posited variations) is expressly causally linked, via the particle gar, to the underlying attributes of the object in question (the smoothness of the rock), expressed through the predicative use of esti (in Kahn’s first-order ‘Noun is Adjective’ form). That is, a modally charged claim about the possibility of an action (one carefully tailored to the possible future activity of the interlocutor) is justified by a statement of fact about the world expressed through a predicative einai.
Two further portions of Circe’s treatment of Scylla and Charybdis display this constellation of textual features and patterns of thought. After finally describing Charybdis, Circe concludes (Od. 12.106–110):
Here the entirety of Gill’s and Knudsen’s deliberative programmes are condensed into five lines. As with the Sirens episode, the conclusion comes first, in the imperative-like optative: ‘do not happen to be present there’ (106b). Then immediately we have the premise, linked by the gar in line 107: ‘for nobody could rescue you out from out of that ill, not even Poseidon.’ In a move that Gill suggests is typical, Circe teases out the implications of the first course of action before moving on to the second, her rejection a ‘crucial preliminary to the reaching of a conclusion’, which is expressed in another imperative (lines 108–09) that concludes the chain of inferences linked to the premises (109–10), as Knudsen suggests is common, by the word epei (109).Footnote 61 This premise is stated with a normative colouring of the sort pinpointed by Gill’s formulation ‘if I do x, then y will happen, and this involves z, which is bad or good’: πολὺ φέρτερόν ἐστιν (‘it is better by far’) to lose six men than all of them.
This line of argument is further elaborated thanks to Odysseus’ only interjection during Circe’s exposition. He tests the validity of the premise that yields her second conclusion: is it really necessary, he asks, to lose even six men? Circe’s response is unsparing (Od. 12.117–23):
In this reaffirmation of the premise that six men will be lost if Odysseus travels via Scylla, one sees most clearly the role of the unusually lengthy description section (12.73–81a, 83–100), continued briefly here (12.118–120a), in which Scylla is presented: a bane, immortal, terrible, grievous, not to be fought. The use of the classic form of description – verbs in the omnitemporal present (and especially the predicative use of einai), textual ordering on the basis of a non-temporal underlying pattern – establishes basic facts about what the world is like by attributing qualities to the individual in question, and these basic facts in turn serve as the key evidence supporting larger claims (notably also expressed in negative modal terms) – οὐδέ τις ἔστ᾽ ἀλκή· φυγέειν κάρτιστον ἀπ᾽ αὐτῆς – which lead to or logically require a particular conclusion, expressed in the form of the advice that Circe gives. At the bottom of this complexly woven chain of argument, then, one which culminates in the necessary selection of one item in an exclusive disjunction by virtue of a modally mandated rejection of the other, is a series of facts about the world being traversed: what-there-is, what what-there-is is like in such-and-such a way, and what what-there-is in such-and-such a way makes or does not make possible.
4.2.3 Krisis: Assessments and Cautions
What we see, then, is a remarkable coalescence of (a) the three linguistic features we have so far been discussing within (b) the framework of the type of dependence we have so far sketched out (see Section 4.2.2) involving (c) one of the two possibilities of the rhetorical schema of the hodos (viz. an exclusive, exhaustive disjunction, or krisis). Key features (often expressed through a predicative esti and/or a modally charged negation) of characters introduced (often with an existential esti) in the course of extraordinarily lengthy, well-developed description sections establish basic states of affairs; these in turn go on to serve as the evidence on the basis of which (a relationship articulated, as suggested by Knudsen, by gar or epei) Circe’s instruction (which is thus also the conclusion of an inferential process) is supported in the instruction/argument section that follows. This process in turn proceeds according to Gill’s pattern of working through the implications of a course (no longer only of action, but now a physical course in the sense of cursus). What is more, this plays out within the context of the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction formed by a fork in the physical hodos and, paired with the modally charged negations introduced in the description sections, amounts to a ‘proscription-by-negation’ rendering one option strictly impassable and impossible, which thus forces, implicitly or explicitly, her male mortal charge to choose the alternative path.
What does this mean for Parmenides? Much in the preceding paragraph should sound arrestingly familiar to scholars of Parmenides’ poem. Evaluating the nature and significance of the overlaps between the features of Odyssey 12.55–126 explored in this last section and Parmenides’ poem (to be explored in Chapter 5 below) is a delicate task, however – and not least because these involve similarities of different kinds and at different scales, and these in turn differ considerably in their degree of closeness or markedness. In some cases, we may feel we can advance claims with considerable confidence; in others, definitive answers will be in short supply. There can be no debating the extremely high degree of commonality between the scenario described in preceding paragraph and, as we shall explore in the next chapter, in parts of Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’. By contrast, regarding the use of esti, or gar and epei, we might be content to note the striking similarities without feeling compelled to make firmer, or unduly grandiose, claims.
Three factors should be considered when assessing these aspects of the relationship between Parmenides and Od.12.55–126. The first concerns how distinctive the features in question are to Od.12.55–126. The second concerns how close or precise the overlaps between Odyssey 12 and Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ are.Footnote 62 The third concerns the Parmenidean side of the ledger: to what extent is Parmenides’ own intellectual agenda likely to be the driving force behind the specificities of his usage, rather than the particular features of the Homeric text he inherited?Footnote 63 In the remainder of the chapter, I shall consider the first and (more briefly) the third points; the second (and, again rather briefly, the third) will be discussed at length in the following two chapters, particularly Chapter 5.
The second half of this chapter has been devoted to examining how the forks in the hodos at Od. 12.55–126 play out at the levels of rhetorical schemata and types of dependence. But are these forks really so distinctive? Early archaic Greek poetry furnishes a pair of celebrated instances where a similar image is leveraged to great effect, Hesiod’s Works and Days 213–18 and 287–92. Nor was Parmenides alone in making use of this image in the late archaic period; the presumed influence of these two passages from Hesiod on Theognis 911–14 has often been discussed.Footnote 64 So is this not simply a stock image?Footnote 65
To this mix some scholars have also been tempted to add the texts inscribed on a dozen or so gold tablets (sometimes dubbed ‘Orphic’) discovered in tombs across Magna Graecia, some of which seem to have suggestive points of overlap with Parmenides’ poem.Footnote 66 Do these tablets not also provide directions for travelling a hodos traversing the BeyondFootnote 67 – perhaps even one where some sort of a fork in the road must be confronted?Footnote 68 Are not the set of religious and eschatological associations conjured by this itinerary no less suggestive, no less potent (and perhaps even more so) than the social or ethical ones conjured by Hesiod’s hodoi in Works and Days?
To be sure, some of the similarities between parts of Parmenides’ poem and Hesiod’s crossroads or the golden tablets are indeed evocative. And, as will be clear from the Introduction, I am strongly in favour of any readings of Parmenides’ poem that can help relocate him more firmly in his time, place, and poetic and sociocultural context. Similarly, it is not at all my goal to advocate for a single-mindedly Homeric reading of Parmenides, one that claims for Homer a monopoly on influencing Parmenides to the exclusion of all other forms of archaic poetic, cultural, and religious life. Far from it. But from the perspective of Parmenides’ place in the history of thought, there are nevertheless crucial differences between lines 12.55–126 of the Odyssey and the two passages of Hesiod (and archaic epigone) just cited or the texts of the gold tablets recovered from various sites in Magna Graecia. It is to these latter we must now turn.
First, in the golden tablets, unlike in Odyssey 12, when the possibility of taking more than one path emerges, there is no interest whatsoever in arguing for – or against – a specific selection. Rather, one simply receives a one-line injunction along the lines of, for example, ‘Do not even go near this spring!’ (ταύτᾶς τᾶς κράνας μēδὲ σχεδὸν ἐνγύθεν ἔλθēις, GJ 1 = Edmonds B10), before the instructions continue on (space is at a premium on a gold tablet, one might think, and the important thing is just to make the right choice, not to prove the merits of choosing one way or the other).Footnote 69 Since my interest is in understanding Parmenides’ development of extended deductive argumentation and the constitutive elements of demonstration, this is a very important point.
On the other hand, the diversion towards the lake and the white cypress is, one presumes, a genuine feature of the physical landscape (however this might be understood by initiates). What is more, it is hard to imagine that a deceased mortal, initiated or otherwise, might try to reject the two options available and instead advocate the merits of fashioning some kind of third, alternative route or course of action. In this, some tablets are indeed like Odyssey 12.55–126. By contrast, Hesiod’s conceptualization of qualities like hybris and dikē, kakotēs and aretē Footnote 70 by mapping them onto an imagined spatial domain, and then figuring a dichotomy between them via the apparently exclusive, exhaustive disjunction of a forked path, does not change the fact that it leaves open an entire terrain of potential responses. As Lloyd pointed out, even in the context of traditional polar expressions, when these involve different ways of addressing a problem or articulating an ethical choice, there is always the possibility of elaborating a third option, be that a middle way or a new axis along which to construct the dichotomy.Footnote 71 Might not a resourceful Perses always have been able to respond that there is a third way between pure hybris and pure dikē, pure kakotēs and pure aretē? Or could he not transpose the problem to a different landscape, a pragmatic one, say, rather than an ethical one (or vice versa, depending on how one understands the meaning of aretē and kakotēs)?Footnote 72 Odysseus (and an initiate travelling the route from the golden tablet), however, is stuck in the physical world as it is; there is no option for him to invent some unthought of third way to Thrinacia between Scylla and Charybdis, or to transpose himself to a differently configured map.
Furthermore, it is extremely telling that we see no hint of any kind of modal charge to the negations in either Works and Days or the golden tablets. That is precisely because the choices presented in both texts are in fact genuine choices. Indeed, in both Works and Days and the golden tablets, the conundrum – and thus the need for advice in the first place – lies in the fact that either route could be, and in fact routinely is, selected. One could very easily divert from one’s path forward by veering right to refresh oneself at the spring by the white cypress (as the imperfective participle suggests – cf. e.g. κατερχόμεναι (GJ 1=Edmonds B10) – the souls of the dead do so regularly). Equally, one could all too easily choose the route to kakotēs, to whose dwelling the hodos is short and smooth; that it is ever so much more inviting than the long, rough, steep path of aretē is precisely why one needs to be warned from it. There is no ‘proscription-by-negation’ in either the Works and Days or in the golden tablets because there could not be: in each case, the path one is advised against taking is simply the ordinary path that mortals, or their souls, do so often take. As we shall see, this difference between the hodoi enumerated by Circe (in which only one of the possibilities is truly viable at each krisis) and those we find in Hesiod and on the golden tablets is of the utmost importance for Parmenides and his invention of extended deductive argumentation and key features of demonstration.
There is another important pair of points to be made concerning the relationship between the itinerary Circe sketches out in Od. 12.55–126 and some similarities this shares with other cultural artefacts of the archaic (or, in the case of the golden tablets, the classical) era, be these the confronting of a crossroads, the navigation of a hodos through the Beyond, the use of a pattern of deliberation, or thinking in terms of polar opposites. While there are important points of overlap with Hesiod’s Works and Days 216–17 and 287–92, the golden tablets, and the texts analysed by Lloyd, Gill, and Knudsen, it happens that all the features that Odyssey 12.55–126 shares with one or another of the texts discussed coalesce in the hodos that Circe details in the same book. Just as neither the analyses of Gill and Knudsen nor Lloyd’s discussion of polar opposites implies that there is nothing unique in Circe’s particular use of the general structures that each scholar described, so we may observe that in Odyssey 12, it is not only that a hodos is presented which helps a mortal navigate the physical geography of some portion of the Beyond, as in the tablets – nor only that the crossroads imagery constructs a choice between two alternatives that come into their own as alternatives, as in Works and Days. Likewise, what we find in Odyssey 12 is not just another instantiation of a polar expression; nor is it just another instance of a deliberative process that considers alternatives only to eliminate one and select the other; nor is it just another use of road imagery in providing instructions for navigating the physical geography of an Elsewhere; nor is it just another example of the use of a forked path to articulate a dichotomy. Each aspect of Odyssey 12.55–126 that overlaps with the different expressions of archaic Greek culture surveyed above in fact reveals just how distinctive this portion of the Odyssey is.
Indeed, it is precisely this very confluence of these features in one passage that makes Odyssey 12.55–126 so distinctive and so valuable for Parmenides.Footnote 73 The whole of this passage of Odyssey 12 is incomparably greater than the sum of its archaic Greek parts. That the dichotomous choice between courses of action is quite literally between physical courses (of action) creates an extraordinarily powerful tool – the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction or krisis – which, when combined with argumentative support for the route to be chosen (or rather, a modally charged argument strictly ruling out one possibility, and therefore requiring that the other be chosen), simply cannot be found in any of these features individually. As we have seen, Lloyd observes that in very many cases there is the possibility of elaborating a third option in a polar expression. In the golden tablets, there is no interest at all in examining the other route in the fashion described by Gill; it is simply a wrong turn one should avoid on the way to the Lake of Memory, and there is apparently no need to explore the possibility of going to this spring, to think through the consequences of this course (of action), to reject it in favour of another alternative. Nor is there any interest in providing an argumentatively pregnant justification for selecting the one route over the other. If, as we shall see in Chapter 5, what matters to Parmenides is having the ability to leverage a uniquely potent argumentative tool that forces a voyager down one route or the other, this is something that neither a generic ‘polar expression’ nor the topography of the afterlife, nor even the rhetorical device of Hesiod’s two hodoi, can offer. Rather, this is a distinctive feature of the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction formed by a choice between two physical routes, and two physical routes alone, when one must press forward (and so cannot take neither), when one has a body that cannot be divided (and so one cannot take both), and when, in the end, only of the routes is actually viable. What we find in Hesiod, the golden tablets, and in most of the examples discussed by Lloyd and Gill are in fact genuine choices; what we find in Circe’s hodos, and what we shall find in Parmenides, is an apparent choice that, upon further descriptive reflection and argumentation, is in fact no choice at all. And for Parmenides, for the emergence of demonstration (which must begin from a point that all accept and cannot be rejected), and for the Western tradition of thought defined by the kind of knowledge demonstration produces, that makes all the difference.
This much concerns largely (though not exclusively) the level of rhetorical schemata. But there are other distinctive features of the krisis in Circe’s hodos at the level of dependence. An essential part of what we have been building up in the second half of this chapter is an analysis of the discursive framework used to express the options forming this choice – the description of the two alternatives – and the process by which one or the other is to be selected. At the level of types of dependence, the description sections play a vital role in establishing the possible courses (of action) insofar as they provide the raw material for the premises in the ensuing argument sections that, in their turn, ultimately yield a conclusion in the form of an imperative to a certain kind of action. In Odyssey 12, Circe is judicious about introducing only those characters and places, and describing only those qualities, that have a direct bearing on the choice to be made and the argument to be supplied in support of her instructions. This in turn means that the description sections become much longer and more extensive than in the other entries in Circe’s hodos-catalogue (or in Homer generally) in order to present the information necessary for the argument. By contrast, the role of narration sections is much diminished: what matters is the state of affairs that constitutes the options of the choice. Again, this is something that is entirely different from both the Works and Days and the golden tablets.Footnote 74
Finally, what are we to make of the three textual features discussed above? Functioning as limit cases of a sort, they present a rather more complex picture. Taken individually, it is hard to say that their appearance in Od. 12.55–126 seems terribly distinctive or marked. One finds the verb form esti often enough in archaic poetry (though, as noted, almost never with such frequency). Similarly, the practice of negating statements with a modal charge is not only to be found in such passages already discussed as the Invocation to the Muses in Iliad 2, but also, inter alia, in some of the reworkings it underwent at the hands of other archaic poets, as well as in plenty of other unrelated contexts.Footnote 75 Epei and gar, meanwhile, are of course simply basic linguistic items whose use, particularly in the case of gar, are an extremely ordinary feature of the syntax of oral poetry.Footnote 76
These questions take on special importance when we consider the Parmenidean side of the ledger. It would be a great folly, for example, to suggest that Od. 12.55–126 is somehow the primary driver motivating Parmenides’ thematization of the question what-is, or that his ground-breaking examination of modality is merely the result of his engagement with this passage, or that his interest in rigorously supporting his claims with arguments is just a minor outgrowth of Homer’s practice in Odyssey 12 or elsewhere. Any sensible attempt to address these questions would of course consider Parmenides in relation to a much, much broader array of predecessors, contemporaries, and even successors, and would place his own agenda squarely at the centre of the answers provided.Footnote 77
Pinning down the exact nature of the relationship between Od. 12.55–126 and Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ at this word-by-word level of granularity will always be difficult, and little in my argument hangs on the specific answers one might wish to supply (or even on answers being hazarded at all). Nevertheless, to the extent that they force us to ask other interesting questions, they are worthy of brief consideration here. At just what point do unmarked, not terribly distinctive features become distinctive? How much does it matter that in this passage of the Odyssey we encounter with unprecedented frequency the use of modally charged negations or the third person singular esti, both of which are, of course, distinctive hallmarks of Parmenides’ poem? Are there ways in which specific combinations of the features identified – for example, the use of esti to provide the evidence upon which is based, via a gar or an epei, an instruction that serves as the conclusion of a practical deliberation; or, similarly, the combination of a modally charged negation and an exclusive, exhaustive disjunction, to form a proscription, and thus a prescription, by negation – can, when taken as unit, form something more marked and less typical, more distinctive and less frequently trafficked? How ought we to weigh this against the importance of these features for Parmenides’ own philosophical agenda? And – to turn this question on its head – to what extent could we imagine that his agenda might have been shaped in part by the fact that it was this passage, with its distinctive or marked use of indistinctive and unmarked features of the Greek language, that Parmenides reworked?
This is not the place to attempt to answer these questions, since it is the commonalities at the level of the rhetorical schema and levels of dependence that are central to the points that I want to make. For the moment, one might simply observe that the similarities are there, whatever one is to make of them, and that what is desirable is perhaps a more subtly graded spectrum than a simple declaration that something ‘IS’ or ‘IS NOT’ intertextual;Footnote 78 rather, we might ideally locate different degrees of intertextual proximity or distance.
4.3 Concluding Remarks
In this chapter, we have examined two key aspects of the hodos that spans Odyssey 12.39–141. As our analysis in Chapter 3 would lead us to expect, at the level of rhetorical schemata we saw that, as a form of catalogic discourse, Circe’s hodos formed a catalogue with three entries, Od. 12.39–54, 12.55–126, and 12.127–41 (Section 4.1). These were ordered in accordance with the narrative movement in time through a sequence of spatially contiguous places – according to the principle of spatio-temporal con-sequence, that is, proper to the hodos (Section 4.1.1). At the level of types of dependence, meanwhile, we again saw a clear pattern according to which very brief narrative frames introduce portions of description, which were in turn followed by portions of justified instruction or argument (Section 4.1.2.1). Compared to the hodos in Odyssey 10, the relationship between the description and instruction/argument sections is notably more elaborate and developed in Odyssey 12: description sections introduce key characters and places, and then hone in on attributes of the story-world that prove crucial for the argumentatively justified instructions that follow, which explore the details introduced in a remarkably probing, sophisticated manner (Section 4.1.2.2). This analysis will form the basis of the discussion of Fragment 8 in Chapter 6.
Examining Od. 12.55–126 revealed further nuances to this basic format (Section 4.2). At the level of rhetorical schemata, the notion of a hodos-unit helped accommodate the phenomenon of the krisis, or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction between two possible places (each with the potential to form its own episode; Section 4.2.1). Seen through this unit of analysis, Circe’s hodos was made of four entries – the Sirens (Od. 12.39–54), a choice between the Planctae and the Two Rocks (Od. 12.59–71a), a choice between Scylla and Charybdis (Od. 12.71b–126), and then Thrinacia (Od. 12.127–41; Section 4.2.1).
What is more, there are two major implications at the level of dependence. In the first place, these two krisis sections involve very little activity at the top level of narration – the instruction or argument level of the first choice (viz. Od. 12.81b–82) in effect usurped, or at least did double duty, as the narration section for the second choice (Section 4.2.1). Second, since the argument sections involve instructions about which place to choose, and not merely how to behave (or not) when arriving there, the amount of description involved in presenting the options of the krisis balloons tremendously: when, in Richardson’s terms, the places themselves are ‘what matters’, the result is a section of description long enough to rival any other portion of description we find in the surviving Homeric corpus (Section 4.2.2). Third, this also results in an even more sophisticated, and deeply intertwined relationship between the description and instruction/argument sections (‘Three features’, Section 4.2.2.1). Particularly important features of this relationship are the use of esti (in several of its senses: announcing the existence of entities in the story-world, and attributing crucial qualities to them in order to ground the instructions to come and assessing the relative merits of two courses of action); gar and epei (to articulate the inferential and justificatory relationships between premises and conclusions); and descriptions-by-negation, especially with a modal charge. Ultimately, this yielded complex, multilayered chains of argumentation that repeatedly (and, ultimately, recursively) drew on the facts of the world presented in the description section. Of particular significance for the following chapter, this nexus of features – and, in particular, the combination of modally charged negations; the Homeric mode of deliberation explored by Gill; and the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction or krisis formed by a fork in the hodos – offers Parmenides a set of resources he will put to ground-breaking use.
Finally, careful consideration of other texts or traditions, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days and the Orphic gold tablets, often cited as similar to Od. 12.55–126 or as parallels to aspects of Parmenides’ poem, reveal in the end just how distinctive this portion of the Odyssey is (Section 4.2.3, ‘Krisis: Assessments and Cautions’) – and, as we shall see in Chapter 5, just how important it is for Parmenides’ ground-breaking poem, and the history of Western thought. By identifying these similarities explored in sections 4.1 and 4.2 and Parmenides’ poem (especially in chapters 6 and 5, respectively) – and by tracing the differences that emerge in the course of comparing them – we can glean key insights into the discursive strategies deployed by Parmenides as he pieces together his new way of constructing an argument and making it inconvertibly persuasive. To develop a view of the basic outline of the architecture of Circe’s hodos is thus to develop a view of precisely the framework Parmenides uses to fashion his revolutionary argument, to mediate his new concept of thinking with certainty, knowing with certainty, and proving with certainty – or so I shall argue in chapters 5 and 6. Should this analysis of Circe’s hodos prove compelling, we would have before our eyes the blueprint of the discursive architecture Parmenides used to build the first recorded sequence of extended deductive argumentation in Western thought.
I discussed above, especially in the Introduction and Chapter 2, some of the important links between Homer’s Odyssey – especially the Apologoi and, even more so, Odyssey 12 – and Parmenides’ poem. That analysis only scratched the surface, however, and in the beginning of this chapter I shall examine the relationship between these two poems at much greater length. Fortunately, we can pick up where earlier studies have left off.Footnote 1 If much of the literary analysis performed by scholars of Parmenides has focused on the Proem, this is partly because there is much to say.Footnote 2 What is important for our purposes at this stage is the manner in which the proem establishes a progressively more Odyssean ambience, creating a dramatic setting that, as it proceeds towards Fragment 2, evokes the relationship between Odysseus and Circe on Aeaea more and more specifically.
Havelock’s comparison begins with the claim that ‘books ten to twelve of the Odyssey (or a section approximating thereto)’ are Parmenides’ ‘central frame of reference’ in his poem.Footnote 3 This case can be made in terms of the proem’s language, imagery, characters, and dramatic scenarios, much of which is reminiscent of these books of the Odyssey.Footnote 4 Odysseus’ description of the land of the Laestrygonians is recycled nearly wholesale;Footnote 5 similarly, the ‘Daughters of the Sun’, the guardians of the Sun’s cattle on Thrinacia (Od. 12.131–36), are ‘converted from herdsmen into outriders’ who lead the chariot bearing the kouros (Fr. 1.9–10).Footnote 6 Collectively these images and intertextual echoes conjure a setting redolent of the ‘world’s end … a mysterious borne far off the beaten track, a region of mystery and peril but also of revelation’.Footnote 7
This in turn figures the kouros as a kind of Odysseus.Footnote 8 As the latter’s voyage in the Apologoi extends ‘beyond normal human latitudes’, so the former’s ‘journey is also an excursion beyond the bounds of accepted experience’ and seems ‘modeled on the bold enterprise of an epic hero, Odysseus’.Footnote 9 Odysseus’ encounters in the Apologoi have been seen to be patterned on the dynamics of the quest, which involves his arrival at an unknown place followed by a meeting with ‘someone who gives information or acts as a guide’ to help him complete the questFootnote 10 – all of which describes Parmenides’ kouros and his situation in Fragment 1 to perfection.
But not just anyone will act as his guide: the ‘foreground of Parmenides’ imagination is occupied by Circe on Aeaea’Footnote 11 – Circe, who is, after all, the Daughter of Helios, and Aeaea which is, after all, where ‘Dawn has her dancing floor and the sun rises’ (Od. 12.3–4).Footnote 12 The links connecting Circe and the unnamed goddess of Parmenides’ poem are rich and multifaceted.Footnote 13 Circe, ‘goddess endowed with dread speech’ (Od. 10.136 = Od. 11.8 = Od. 12.150), has the ability to ‘report verities of the mantic world and thus induce or at least indicate the hero’s’ further travel: ‘her helpful power is to … facilitate for him further stages of his symbolic journey’; Circe helps Odysseus ‘penetrate … to a deeply guarded area of the mythic geography’ where knowledge of incomparable magnitude is to be found.Footnote 14 In short, Circe, a female divinity with exceptionally privileged access to knowledge, guides the mortal male hero Odysseus on a journey which includes travel to a place where he will attain a level of profound knowledge: a description that could hardly better fit the dramatic scenario of fragments 1–8.Footnote 15
What is more, Circe has long been recognized as a vital turning point in Odysseus’ wanderings.Footnote 16 According to one popular analysis, the Nekuia serves as the pivot around which is wrapped the elaborate series of nested ring compositions that form the episodes of the Apologoi;Footnote 17 since it is from Circe’s isle that the trip departs and to Circe’s isle that it returns – and, as we have seen, on Circe’s orders, and only thanks to her guidance, that the trip is successfully undertaken – this makes Circe (in her instruction-giving mode, after her threat to Odysseus has been neutralized) a central figure anchoring the entire Apologoi.Footnote 18 There are a number of different facets to this point, and one can tease out at least four implications for Parmenides’ poem.
Most importantly, scholars have noted that the encounter with Circe divides the Apologoi into two parts. Before encountering Circe, Odysseus and his men wander; after, they sail with the direction and purposefulness that only her supernatural guidance makes possible.Footnote 19 Odysseus’ pre-Circean wanderings are epitomized by the calamitous episode bookended by encounters with Aeolus, king of the winds. Having taken their leave of his harmonious kingdom with all the winds but one held at bay for their convenience, Odysseus and his men have very nearly completed their journey in full (ὁδὸν ἐκτελέσαντες, Od. 10.41) – the hearth fires of home are even in sight! – when Odysseus’ men, mistrustful that the spoils Odysseus has collected along the way will be evenly distributed, open the sack holding the winds; once loosed, these promptly blow the ship all the way back to the shores of Aeolus’ floating island. (As scholars of Parmenides have on occasion noticed, the episode thus embodies the very paradigm of a backward-turning path.)Footnote 20 By contrast, from the moment they depart Circe’s island up until they reach Thrinacia – the full extent of the itinerary for which Circe gives her instructions – Odysseus and his men make clear, unambiguous, linear progress towards their final destination of Ithaca.
There is another way of putting the matter. Scholars have discerned a number of thematic and compositional patterns characterizing the relationship between different episodes in the Apologoi,Footnote 21 and careful consideration of these analyses suggests that Circe’s island serves as the mirror across which beckons the second, positive, goal-directed reflection of the first, wandering half of the Apologoi. Here, recourse to the graphs of various analysts of the Apologoi’s ring compositions are useful. A slightly modified form of Most’s graph in Figure 5.1 helps make the point vividly.Footnote 22
Figure 5.1 The structure of Odysseus’ Apologoi
By choosing to model his hodos dizēsios on the portion of the Apologoi that begins not at the departure from Troy, but rather from Aeaea – a kind of second point of departure, or a first point of informed departure – Parmenides in effect cuts off half of the Odyssey’s ring composition, thereby rendering linear the circular form of the erstwhile ring;Footnote 23 as we shall see, the effect is compounded by honing in on the first phase of the second half of the trip (the leg spanning Aeaea, Sirens, Scylla/Charybdis, Thrinacia) where the clearest progress is made anywhere in Odysseus’ journey home. Were one looking to shift from a circular, backward-turning mode of discourse in order to create a sequential, goal-directed mode of discourse, beginning from the very centre of the ring would accomplish this elegantly by shearing off a linear discursive pattern.
This observation leads to two further points. As noted, scholars have also discerned in the Circe episode a deeper shift from one kind of story-type to another; Circe’s island, that is, marks the point where a quest type becomes a nostos type – or rather, nostos becomes the mission of the quest.Footnote 24 The narratological correlate of the unguided wandering of the Apologoi before Odysseus ‘tames’ Circe is a kind of indefinite concatenation of quests, one linked to the other apparently without end. On the other hand, with Circe’s instructions in hand, the nostos, with its highly marked sense of destinationality, becomes the goal of the quest. A plot structure revolving around arrival at a single, ultimate destination, rather than in indefinite series of concatenated quests, could hardly have proved more useful to Parmenides’ notion of a hodos dizēsios.Footnote 25
Finally, there is also a geographic dimension to the point. The near miss with Ithaca after the first sojourn on the island of Aeolus only underscores how, from the perspective of the telos of Ithaca, Odysseus’ movement in the first half of the Apologoi is centrifugal. In certain respects, Circe’s island represents the far apogee of this centrifugality; not only is it at the end of the earth, near where the Sun has his dancing field, but it is also the one place where Odysseus himself forgets Ithaca and must be reminded by his crew.Footnote 26 Thanks to the goddess’s instructions, Odysseus’ movement through space, centrifugal up until his arrival on Aeaea, becomes centripetal.Footnote 27 In short, at the thematic, structural, narratological, and geographic levels, Parmenides would have found in the Circe episode elements of enormous value to rework for his own ends.
What does this mean for Parmenides? First, that scholars are mistaken when they attempt to draw a contrast between the kouros in Parmenides’ poem and Odysseus. Only if one fails to consider how the encounter with Circe divides the entire Apologoi into two parts – pre-Circean wandering, post-Circean journeying – can one claim, for example, that while ‘both protagonists travel far beyond the familiar track into eschatological locations, their journeys diametrically diverge’.Footnote 28 In fact, exactly the reverse is true. While it is certainly the case that ‘the kouros’ divine guides escort him directly to his goal … and precisely prevent him from undergoing the wandering which the poem associates throughout with error and ignorance’, that ‘Odysseus is repeatedly made to wander astray’ before his encounter with Circe is irrelevant.Footnote 29 What matters is that Odysseus’ divine guide also guides him directly to his goal that he may avoid the wandering which had plagued him earlier in the Apologoi.Footnote 30 Similarly, it is incorrect to assert that in Parmenides’ poem ‘the meandering Odyssean adventure is … reshaped as a linear journey’.Footnote 31 Attending to the structure of the Apologoi and the decisive role Circe plays in this portion of the Odyssey, we see instead that Parmenides leverages with tremendous skill a distinction between wandering and goal-directed journeying that was already clearly demarcated in Homer. By choosing to model his hodos on just the point in the Apologoi where Odysseus receives instructions from his female divinity with privileged access to knowledge (the guided, directed journeying that forms a true hodos, and not the untethered, backward-turning wandering of ignorant mortals), Parmenides plucks the portion of the Apologoi that suits his needs while sanitizing it of Odysseus’ pre-Circean wanderings by relegating them to a separate, distinct hodos he emphasizes must be avoided at all costs.Footnote 32 Instead, it is much more accurate – and much more interesting – to point out that by isolating a portion of the circumference of the Homeric ring composition that forms the Apologoi, the circular movement of the thematic and discursive progression of the Homeric text is refashioned as a linear, goal-directed (or at least non-circular) movement – a movement that is paralleled much more macroscopically by the transition Parmenides effects from a myth of nostos (of a return to a place of origin) to an extended deductive argument that leads to a conclusion.
This takes us to just the moment in Odyssey 12 when Circe promises to give Odysseus the instructions he will need to undertake his journey (Od. 12.25–26):
Before she narrates the hodos to Odysseus, however, she ‘takes him by the hand’ (ἡ δ᾽ ἐμὲ χειρὸς ἑλοῦσα, Od. 12.32) in order to speak to him alone;Footnote 33 then she begins the tale of the hodos. In Parmenides’ poem, having travelled to a distant place of revelation, a place at land’s end far from the usual haunts of men (ἀπ’ ἀνθρώπων ἐκτὸς πάτου, Fr. 1.27),Footnote 34 the male mortal voyager of the proem is greeted by a female divinity with privileged access to knowledge by nothing other than a clasp of the hand – χεῖρα δὲ χειρί | δεξιτερὴν ἕλεν (Fr. 1.22–23).Footnote 35 Then, she, too, begins the tale of the hodos.Footnote 36
5.1 Disjunctions
The tight parallels between Parmenides’ poem and Odyssey 12 extend beyond the dramatic scenario and the dramatis personae, and – what is much less recognizedFootnote 37 – well beyond the proem. When Parmenides’ goddess speaks, her language, too, echoes the Circe of Odyssey 12. So Circe opens her speech (Od. 12.37–38):
and introduces the choice between the two hodoi (Od. 12.56–58):
Parmenides’ goddess, meanwhile, begins (Fr. 2.1–2):
The linguistic overlap is striking: the goddess in question declares that she will tell her mortal charge (ἐγὼν ἐρέω, Od. 12.38; ἐρέω, Od. 12.58; ἐγὼν ἐρέω, Fr. 2.1) what comes next;Footnote 39 underscores the importance of listening to her (σὺ … ἄκουσον, Od. 12.37; σὺ … ἀκούσας, Fr. 2.1); mentions a closed set of hodoi that she will present (ὁπποτέρη … ὁδὸς … ἀμφοτέρωθεν, Od. 12.57–58; αἵπερ ὁδοὶ μοῦναι, Fr. 2.2);Footnote 40 and invokes the being of these roads, be it possible or actual, present or future (ὁδὸς ἔσσεται, Od. 12.57; ὁδοὶ … εἰσι, Fr. 2.2).
Continuing with these two passages, we find yet another similarity in the use of men … de … clauses to introduce the alternatives. In Circe’s hodos telling, men … de … clauses play an important role in articulating both pairs of alternatives one finds in the ‘Choice’ discourse-unit of the hodos (Od. 12.55–81, 12.73–110; see Section 4.2.2 above). So, too, Parmenides’ goddess presents the two hodoi as follows (Fr. 2.3–5):
Furthermore, in both Od. 12.59–81 and Fragment 2 lines 3 and 5, the goddess who expresses the krisis or fork in the road takes great care to present the two alternatives in a highly symmetrical manner. Circe correlates the same words (πέτραι, 12.59; λὶς πέτρη, 12.64 [Planctae]; πέτρη…λὶς, 12.79 [Scylla]), the same characters (e.g. Amphitrite (12.60 and 12.97)), and the same technique of ‘description-by-negation’ (12.62–4 and 12.83–84).Footnote 42 Likewise, the scrupulous congruities defining the phrasing of Parmenides’ Fragment 2 lines 3 and 5 have been illustrated by the close symmetry marking the pair rendered in propositional form (e.g. ‘to think that A and that B’ and ‘to think that not-A and that not-B’) and in rudimentary logical notation – e.g. ‘A and necessarily ¬(¬A)’ and ‘¬A and necessarily ¬A’.Footnote 43
The similarities between Parmenides’ Fragment 2 and Od. 12.55–126 extend to the level of discourse modes and the types of dependence that define their relationship (Figure 5.2). Recall that the normal discourse-unit in Odyssey 10 and 12 involves a narration portion, followed by description, which in turn provides the raw material for the instruction and/or argument that follows (Section 3.2, Section 4.2); the ‘either-or’ disjunction of the krisis was associated with its own variant of this pattern, with two distinct levels of description used to advocate rejecting and/or selecting one alternative (Section 4.2). The key features of this pattern are replicated in Parmenides’ Fragment 2. A narration section gives a choice between two hodoi (Od. 12.55–58; Parmenides Fr. 2.1–2), introduced via a men … de … clause, with close symmetry between the two terms. In the Odyssey, these terms are immediately subjected to a further qualification; so, of the πέτραι ἐπηρεφέες introduced by men …, Circe says (Od. 12.61):
While of οἱ … δύω σκόπελοι, introduced by de …, Circe says of the first (Od. 12.80):
In Parmenides, meanwhile, the following qualities are attributed in the men … de … clause (Fr. 2.4, 2.6):
All four lines just presented are classic description, with verbs in the third person present (καλέουσι, ὀπηδεῖ) and predicative uses of einai (Πειθοῦς ἐστι κέλευθος, and, in indirect speech, παναπευθέα ἔμμεν ἀταρπόν). If description is ‘oriented to the statics of the world’, then lines 4 and 6 of Parmenides’ Fragment 2 are perfect examples of it, attributing qualities to the two hodoi in question.
Figure 5.2 Levels of dependence, Od. 12.55–81 and Fr. 2.1–6
Fragment 2 then proceeds as follows (Fr. 2.6–8):
For their part, lines 7–8 display an ‘argument’ discourse mode comparable to Circe’s instructions at Od. 12.106–10:
In both cases we find a conclusion (Fr. 2.6, Od. 12.106) justified (gar)Footnote 49 by a modally charged (an/ken) negation (ou[te]) (Od. 12.107a, Fr. 2.7a, 8).Footnote 50 If Fr. 2.1–6 resembles the first fork in the hodos presented by Circe (Od. 12.55–81), at the upper levels of dependence – narration followed by description – Fr. 2.6–8 resembles the second (12.82–126) at the lower part of the level of dependence – description followed by argument.
The major continuities between Parmenides’ Fragment 2 and Od. 12.55–126 thus obtain not only at the level of diction, but also in terms of the discourse modes used and the order of their sequencing: first narration, then description, and finally instruction/argument. But two very striking differences must also be noted. The first is verbal form. The two ‘conclusions’ of the ‘argument’ sections in the Odyssey take the form of second person imperative optatives (or infinitives) – μὴ σύ … κεῖθι τύχοις (Od. 12.106) and Σκύλλης σκοπέλῳ πεπλημένος ὦκα | νῆα παρὲξ ἐλάαν (Od. 12.108–09) – while the justifying support takes the form of the third person – οὐ … κεν ῥύσαιτό (Od. 12.107) and πολὺ φέρτερόν ἐστιν (Od. 12.109). In Parmenides, by contrast, the justifying support takes the form of the second person – οὔτε … ἂν γνοίης … οὔτε φράσαις (Fr. 2.7–8) – while the conclusion takes the form of a third person indicative (in indirect speech) – τὴν … παναπευθέα ἔμμεν ἀταρπόν (Fr. 2.6).
Second, in Homer the ‘argument’ sections are, as discussed, examples of practical reasoning and arguments insofar as they conclude in an imperative to a particular action. In Parmenides’ Fragment 2, by contrast, the conclusion is a proposition asserting a state of affairs, namely, that a certain object (the second route) has a particular quality (viz., being panapeuthēs). And, strikingly, the support for this claim now encompasses two actions – gignōskein and phrazein (Fr. 2.7–8) – as opposed to the Homeric patterns of deliberation, where the argumentative support is often anchored in basic facts about the world (e.g. the evil that Scylla is, is immortal – ἀλλ᾽ ἀθάνατον κακόν ἐστι [Od. 12.118] – because of the six heads that she has – τῆς ἦ τοι πόδες εἰσὶ δυώδεκα πάντες ἄωροι | ἓξ δέ τέ οἱ δειραὶ περιμήκεες [Od. 12.89–90]).
These transformations bring to the fore two developments of major import. In Homer, facts about the world, expressed in the third person indicative (sometimes negated with a modal charge) serve as the basis for (or provide the raw material for premises of) a kind of practical argument yielding a second person imperative pertaining to some action. In Parmenides, by contrast, second person actions (now negated with the modal charge of the Homeric description sections)Footnote 51 serve as the basis supporting and justifying the assertions that play the role of description, stating facts about the world and attributing qualities to entities that have been introduced (in this case, via the predicative esti, the fact that the second route is ‘entirely without report’, Fr. 2.6). The underlying relationship or ‘type of dependence’ between these two discourse modes has been reversed: the ‘argument’, in both cases centring on actions that can or cannot be taken by the interlocutor, in Parmenides’ poem ultimately supports the assertions made about the world (i.e. descriptions). If Parmenides is one of the first to defend, justify, or argue for his conclusions about the nature of the world, identifying the manner in which he adopts this traditional form of deliberation but reverses the relationship between description and action is of decisive importance (see Table 5.1, Figure 5.3).
Table 5.1 Verbal person and type of ‘situation’Footnote 56 in ‘description’ and ‘argument’ sections, Od. 12 and Fr. 2
Figure 5.3 Types of dependence, Od. 12.83–110 and Fr. 2.3–8
Second, the reversal of person between the verbs of conclusion and premise in Homer and Parmenides spotlights the crucial importance of one of Parmenides’ argumentative strategies: his argument’s dialectical nature.Footnote 52 This dialectical nature is invaluable for securing the foundations of his argument because Parmenides’ assertion at Fr. 2.7–8 ‘is axiomatic within a dialectical context’.Footnote 53 This manoeuvre responds to the problem of what strategy a thinker whose goal is to ‘cut free from inherited premises’ can devise to accomplish this goal.Footnote 54 If one can no longer make arguments on the basis of facts established by description (and even if one wants to do just the reverse, and establish facts through the arguments one presents) how should one proceed? What else could one do other than ‘start from an assumption whose denial is particularly self-refuting’?Footnote 55
These are not the only elements from Od. 12.55–126 to feature prominently in Parmenides’ Fr. 2. Of course, third person singular indicative forms of einai continue to be very important beyond the beguiling but portentous names given to the hodoi at Fragment 2 lines 3 and 5. Similarly, predicative uses of esti attribute qualities to these hodoi, as at Fragment 2 lines 4 and 6. Finally, the particle gar links the conclusion (stated first) to its argumentative support. Finally, the modally charged negations important in Od. 12.55–126 remain fundamental to Parmenides’ Fr. 2, serving as the essential premises for major conclusions (Od. 12.107 for conclusion at Od. 12.106; Fr. 2.7–8 for conclusion at Fr. 2.6) – and if one accepts the view that the force of Fragment 2.6–8 springs from the self-defeating nature of any attempt to refute it, the persistence of the modally charged negation (combined with the switch from third to second person) acquires momentous significance for the history of thought.Footnote 57
We have already discussed at great length the arresting confluence of features found where Gill’s Homeric pattern of deliberation – consideration of different courses of action, rejection of one course, conclusion – intersects with a forking of a hodos. In this special case, ‘course of action’ and ‘course’ – viz. a cursus, part of the itinerary of a journey through physical space – are perfectly coextensive (Section 4.2.3, ‘Assessments and Cautions’); accordingly, basic dynamics of the use of space, namely, the impossibility of travelling two routes at the same time (a crystalline way of imaging – or indeed imagining, thematizing – the abstract notion of mutually exclusive, exhaustive alternatives), or the impossibility of getting from point A to point C except by way of some point B, shapes the nature of the choice. As a result, when Homeric deliberation about what courses of action to take is deliberation about courses, the matrix of possible decisions is concretized in the form of two mutually incompatible, exhaustive alternatives: in other words, a krisis, or exclusive disjunction (see Figures 5.4a, b, c).Footnote 58
Figure 5.4b Circe’s exclusive disjunction (rocks), Od. 12.73–126
In the ‘Choice’ hodos-units of Odyssey 12, we saw that the rejection of one option as a crucial preliminary to a conclusion can take various forms (see Figure 5.5a, b, c). In the case of the Two Roads, the rejection is merely implicit, and emerges from an extended series of ‘descriptions-by-negation’ which are in fact tantamount to a ‘proscription-by-negation’ (Section 4.2.2). In the case of the Two Rocks, the rejection and selection of the other alternative are explicit (Od. 12.106–08). This rejection takes on a special kind of potency within the framework of the mutually exclusive, exhaustive alternatives of the forking hodos. Circe lays bare the power of the either/or choice when noting that Scylla is to be selected not because she represents a desirable option (six men will die); rather, given that nobody would survive the alternative, she is in practice the only option (Od. 12.106–10).Footnote 59
Figure 5.5c Fr. 2: Rejection explicit, selection implicit
Finally, modally charged negation plays the crucial role in eliminating one of the alternatives in the case of the Two Rocks choice (12.107), in effect forcing Odysseus to choose the other term, no matter how grim the prospect (Section 4.2.2.1, ‘Three Features’). Framed in terms of modally inflected impossibility – nobody would be able to save Odysseus, not even Poseidon, master of the sea (Od. 12.107) – this rejection takes on a kind of general, theoretical force, expressing something like a categorical claim. What we see in Fragment 2, then, is a very powerful synthesis of features common in Homeric language and thought – the pattern of Homeric deliberation deemed typical by Gill, a modified ‘description-by-negation’ technique (with a modal charge) – that, when applied to a specific kind of choice (between bifurcating paths denoting physical movement through space), combine to require the selection of one possibility by virtue of the necessary rejection of the other.Footnote 60 This is the moment to cash out the observations in Section 4.2.3 of the previous chapter. Seen from this perspective, Parmenides’ krisis, or ‘exclusive disjunction’, at Fr. 2 loses its novelty and becomes an argumentative device taken over ready-made; it is the use to which this argumentative strategy is put that is transformative and revolutionary.
5.2 Opening Moves
The majority of the transformations effected by Parmenides that we have examined so far come at the level of ‘types of dependence’; there is also, however, one vitally important change undertaken by Parmenides at the level of rhetorical schemata. In Homer, the ‘Choice’ hodos-unit comes in the middle of the journey, after the meadow of the Sirens and before Thrinacia. In Parmenides, by contrast, the krisis portion forms the very first hodos-unit we encounter (see Figure 5.6).
Figure 5.6 Shift: Krisis placed at the beginning of the hodos
Why is this significant? Lloyd noted that ‘the aims of The Way of Truth are clear: Parmenides sets out to establish a set of inescapable conclusions by strict deductive arguments from a starting point that itself has to be accepted. Those are features it shares with later demonstrations.’Footnote 61 The development of interconnected deductive arguments we shall explore in the next chapter; what is at stake here is the notion that, as Parmenides’ successor Diogenes of Apollonia would put it some decades later, ‘anyone beginning an account ought to make the starting point [or principle] indisputable’ (64B1).Footnote 62 Fragment 2 plays the definitive role in securing this.Footnote 63
To put everything together: Parmenides accomplishes this ground-breaking leap in the structure of rigorous argumentation by reconfiguring and recombining discursive elements found in Homer. At the level of ‘types of dependence’, he reverses the roles between description and argumentation, using the argument section to support an assertion advanced in the description section. This argument in turn can be decoupled from previously established facts and remain free-standing: it is self-supporting or self-verifying,Footnote 64 partly as a result of the use of the second person, which gives the argument its dialectical dynamics and force.Footnote 65 And this argument section, insofar as it works in the service of a claim that, in typical Homeric fashion, rules out one alternative – and does so, following Od. 12.55–126, in the context of an exclusive disjunctionFootnote 66 – therefore demands the selection of the other alternative.Footnote 67 Moreover, the modal charge attached to the rejection of the one possibility generates a kind of symmetrical modal valence that is projected onto the other route, which must necessarily be selected if one is to proceed further down any path at all.Footnote 68 All this takes place within one hodos-unit on the journey spelled out by the female goddess to her male mortal charge. Moving this unit to the front of the itinerary, meanwhile, not only forces the mortal voyager down a particular path, ruling the alternative out, but does so from the very beginning of the voyage– before there is any chance of selecting a different starting point, before there is any alternative but to confront this decisive initial krisis.Footnote 69
In both Odyssey 12 and Parmenides’ poem, then, a female divinity with privileged access to knowledge, located in a special Beyond, signs out a hodos that her male mortal charge must travel in order to reach his destination. In both cases this features a choice between two hodoi where one is radically blocked and impassable, and, according to the logic of the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction or krisis, the traveller is therefore forced to proceed by way of the other. In both Odyssey 12 and Parmenides’ poem, the goddess then provides detailed instructions for travel on the remaining route.Footnote 1 We examined the first part of this parallel in Chapter 5; now it is time to examine the second.
Putting matters this way underscores another benefit of analysing the structure of Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ not in terms of a rigid, one-to-one correlation, but with the greater flexibility afforded by the notion of the ‘rhetorical schema’ governed by the hodos. Rather than being forced (as Mourelatos is) to correlate fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8 with Circe’s hodos as it is ordered in lines Od. 12.55–126, with the analysis of Chapter 3 in hand, we are now in a position to examine the possibility that Parmenides exploits the combinatorial possibilities offered by the entire hodos (Od. 12.39–141) and of the rhetorical schema of the hodos more generally. This points towards a core claim: as the catalogic entries ‘Sirens’, ‘Choice/Krisis’, and ‘Thrinacia’ are linked together in Circe’s hodos according to the relationship we have been calling ‘con-sequence’, so the hodos-units articulated in fragments 2, 6 and 7, and 8.5–49 are linked together in the hodos outlined by Parmenides’ goddess according to the same sequentially ordered pattern.
Before approaching the specifics of this claim, a few preliminary points should be stated at the outset. In what follows, I shall adopt several widely agreed-upon tenets concerning the best way to analyse the constituent elements comprising Fragment 8:Footnote 2 that the four sēmata of lines 8.3–4Footnote 3 announce a programme for the remainder of the ‘Route to Truth’;Footnote 4 that these sēmata, which name qualities of to eon, fall into four groups: (i) agenēton kai anōlethron, (ii) oulon mounogenes te,Footnote 5 (iii) atremes, and (iv) teleston;Footnote 6 and that these four qualities of to eon are taken up, and arguments offered in support of them, one by one in the course of lines (i) 8.5/6–21, (ii) 8.22–25, (iii) 8.26–31/33,Footnote 7 and (iv) 8.42–49, respectively.Footnote 8 Because my interest here lies in the formal principles of arrangement organizing the relationship between Parmenides’ arguments rather than in the substance of the claims they advance, I will not attempt to prove the merits of viewing the structure of argument along these lines, which have been widely accepted since at least Owen’s exegesis undertaken more than sixty years ago.Footnote 9 At this stage, we may simply note that the traditional hermeneutic concerns of the poetry critic – attention to the way that repeated words and images help define the structure, and articulate the units, of a poem – are in harmony with analyses that see the repeated use of words like epei as the key to understanding the articulation of the argumentFootnote 10 (rather than, say, a strategy of combing through the body of Fragment 8 for arguments that seem to line up according to our sense of what makes an argument good).Footnote 11
Before moving on to the body of Fragment 8, it is worth observing three additional ways in which the analysis undertaken in the preceding chapters can shed new light on aspects of the use of the word sēma in the opening movements of the fragment. It begins (Fr. 8.1–3):
The precise meaning of the word here is debated. On one view, the four predicates listed in lines 8.3–4 (or 8.3–6)Footnote 14 constitute the sēmata;Footnote 15 on another, it is the arguments (i.e. lines 8.5/6–49) themselves to which the word sēmata refers.Footnote 16 In the first case, the emphasis falls on the notion of a sēma as a physical object acting as a kind of landmark (as often in Homer);Footnote 17 in the second, the hermeneutic demands embedded in the word sēmainō – indicating a message neither immediately intelligible nor entirely opaque, but requiring interpretation – come to the fore.Footnote 18
The first benefit: whichever construal of sēma one favours, we find here yet another benefit of reading Parmenides’ poem against the backdrop of Odyssey 12. Parmenides’ goddess’s choice of words becomes less surprising, and more intelligible, when one recalls that Circe begins her account to Odysseus (Od. 12.25–26):
‘Sign out each thing’ is, in fact, precisely what she does in the course of Od. 12.39–141, just as Parmenides’ goddess will do in the course of Fragment 8.5–49. Had Circe been moved to provide a synoptic overview of ‘each of the things’ she was to ‘sign out’, perhaps she might have provided just such a summary as we find in Fragment 8.3–4; she might even have referred to each of the things to be signed out as a sēma.
Second, the discussion undertaken in Section 1.1 may perhaps help us transcend the division between these two interpretations. Much of this book has proceeded from the premise that one of Parmenides’ main strategies for thinking new thoughts and speaking in new ways is to mobilize and activate the full range of associations between old words – hodos, for example – and their physical referents, their semantic range, and their place in the mesh of discursive, sociocultural, and mythical associations. We will see below how Parmenides exploits the ambivalence between the object-like and activity-like senses of the word hodos. Why should sēma and its word family be any different? Section 1.1 provided several fascinating examples of how both senses of the word sēma – a physical object that can guide, mark, or otherwise act like a road sign, and something whose significance requires interpretation – can intersect, overlap, or be (literally) coextensive. Consider again the inscription on the Altar of the Twelve Gods:Footnote 19
The physical object – a ‘true record’ or ‘truthful monument’ – itself ‘indicates’ or ‘signs out’ a message, but this message is directed to ‘mortals’ and is presented as meaningful in the course of the process of journeying that these mortals will, or at least may wish to, undertake.Footnote 20
Even more arresting in this respect are Hipparchus’ herms, which literally embody all at once the sēma as road sign, a physical object ‘on the route’ signing out the path and its measure (‘you are halfway between the city and the deme of x or y’); the sēma as interpretans, a maxim verbally communicating an important insight about the world, be it moral (e.g. ‘Do not deceive a friend’) or ontological (e.g. ‘what-is is ungenerable and imperishable’);Footnote 21 and the sēma as interpretandum, something to be interpreted in the course of the journey that follows, be it on the road to the astu or the argument supporting the claim about what-is. Here would be one more advantage, then, of reading Parmenides as both a poet and a culturally and physically embedded denizen of the late archaic period, rather than as an analytic philosopher avant la lettre speaking Truth across the void of ages. In the semantic ambiguity of the word sēma, we see Parmenides the poet-thinker, having found only old words and old referents, hammering out new meanings and conceptual connections from the crucible of language upon the anvil of sense and reference.
Third, we may observe the relationship between the programmatic announcement of the sēmata in 8.3–4 and the notion of catalogic discourse discussed above (Section 3.1.4). This inventory of sēmata at lines Fr. 8.3–4 returns us to the characteristics of catalogic speech: the sequential enumeration of a set of items that, were they to form a series (rather than a list), would be ordered according to a specifically determined principle.
This brings us to the substance of Fragment 8 and Parmenides’ argument itself. In brief, my interest lies in examining the types of similarities that obtain between the manner in which the four assertions about the nature of to eon are linked to each other and the kris(e)is in fragments 2 and 6/7, and the manner in which the episode of the Sirens is linked to the krisis between the two hodoi or the trip past Scylla is linked to the sojourn on Thrinacia.Footnote 22
How might this work? Examining the possible answers to this question will form the bulk of the discussion in Section 6.3 below. A preview of one possibility, however, is as follows. The hodos, as a rhetorical schema, makes possible the linking of what we have been calling hodos-units according to a regular ordering principle: the hodos, that is, would play a decisive role in ordering the items of a catalogue into a series. On this view, in place of episodes dramatizing narrative encounters with mythological creatures (such as we find in Homer), in Fr. 8, Parmenides makes claims about the nature of to eon. Where in Homer episodes are sequenced partly on the basis of the spatial contiguity of the locations where the episodes take place in the story-world of the Odyssey, on this view, the claims about to eon would be sequenced on the basis of their ‘spatial contiguity’ in the underlying ‘logical geography’ of the story-world of fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8 (the physical dimension expressed in part through the sēma qua road sign, grave marker, or other physical object fixed in a particular place).Footnote 23 And where in Homer the direction of this sequential ordering of episodes in the narrative is fixed by the necessity that Odysseus move in time from location to location within the story-world, in Parmenides the direction of this sequential ordering of claims seems to be dictated by the same consideration in logical space. Narrative time collapses into story time as this hodos of inquiry is explained to the kouros – and to us. On this reading, the rhetorical schema dictated by the figure of the hodos – and the specific mode of discursive organization we have been calling con-sequence – would then provide the basic framework governing the shape of the discursive architecture of fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8.1–49 (see Figures 6.1a–b).
Figure 6.1a One possibility. Con-sequence: Ordered sequential linkage of discursive units (= hodos-units), frs. 2, 6, 7, and 8.5–21Footnote 25
Having thus previewed a ‘strong’ reading of the relationship between Odyssey 12 and Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’,Footnote 24 it will be important to distinguish the relationships between Fragment 2, fragments 6 and 7, and Fragment 8.5–21 at the level of hodos-units (two kriseis (or one, if one prefers) and the first sēma down the path ‘IS’) from the relationships between lines 5–21, 22–5, 26–33, and 42–49 of Fragment 8. That the first grouping – fragments 2, 6, and 7 and Fragment 8.5–21 – is organized as a series is not today in serious dispute (see discussion at Section 6.3 below). The specific relationship between each of the different sēmata is, however, somewhat more contentious (again, to be discussed in Section 6.3 below). According to some interpretationsFootnote 26 these, too, form a series; according to othersFootnote 27 they are more list-like (though, as we shall see, even on these interpretations, they do not really comprise a list, strictly speaking). Ultimately, my goal in this book is not to plump for one interpretation or the other. Rather, I want to examine how my overall account of Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation – with particular emphasis on his mobilization of the associations of the reference of the word hodos, the ambiguities inscribed in its polysemic nature, and, most of all, via the discursive architecture of the hodos – looks when paired with different plausible, internally consistent interpretations of these arguments themselves; it is to these I shall turn in Section 6.3 below. First, however, in sections 6.1 and 6.2, I shall cash out the previous discussions of narration and narrativity, description and descriptivity by examining Parmenides’ tasks and accomplishments in their intellectual and historical context. In Section 6.1, I place Parmenides in his historical and intellectual context and explore particular limitations that his predecessors confronted, thereby revealing the unique set of discursive resources the rhetorical schema of the hodos offered him. In Section 6.2, I consider these questions from the perspective of Parmenides’ seminal ontological and epistemological innovations, and also their relationship to another set of narratologically complex manoeuvres he performs.
6.1 Sēma I: Systematicity and Argumentativeness
The best way to approach the arguments that make up Fragment 8 is to consider them alongside two crucial aspects of the larger intellectual milieu in which Parmenides may be seen to be working.Footnote 28 First is the question of what we might call discursive systematicity, an attempt to create a discursive structure in which claims are linked according to a regular pattern or underlying set of principles; second, the development of argumentation to support claims advanced (as opposed to a mere assertion of the claims themselves). This demands a brief discussion of earlier (or, in the case of Heraclitus, potentially contemporary)Footnote 29 thinkers.
Scholars have found the Milesians to be the most promising place to look for evidence of discursive systematicity among the immediate precursors of Parmenides.Footnote 30 Any evaluation of the discursive structure and argumentation exhibited in the works of the Ionian cosmologists is gravely constrained, of course, by the paucity of ipsissima verba coming down to us from Miletus.Footnote 31 A charitable reading, however, would see a certain level of discursive systematicity implied by their apparently systematic cosmological theories. The communis opinio remains that ‘cosmogony is the heir of theogony’, and that Hesiod’s Theogony in particular provides the key model for the Ionians on two levels.Footnote 32 In the first place, it supplies a conceptual framework for understanding the world as one kosmos; in the second, it supplies a discursive framework for expressing this in a discursive unity (viz. a single, unified whole organized by a systemically applied rhetorical schema, the rhetorical schema of the genealogy).Footnote 33
A genealogical mode of organizing discursive units does not, however, naturally suggest a role for argumentation that justifies the specific cosmological claims advanced.Footnote 34 (Although, again, any assessment of Milesian argumentation remains provisional on account of the lack of original source material.) And although Anaximander is credited with supporting his claims with argumentation rather than merely asserting them in two justly celebrated instances,Footnote 35 the scholarly consensus is that even ‘where there is apparently genuine disagreement with a predecessor [and] we might expect specific arguments against’ views previously espoused, a Milesian theory ‘seems to be a matter of assertions with connecting links, rather than a system whose basis is argued for and in which the various elements are supported by demonstrations of their connections with first principles’.Footnote 36 A generous view of Milesian thought, then, would grant a kind of systematicity (at both conceptual and, potentially, discursive levels) to their cosmogonies and cosmologies, but detects scant interest in indicating why a particular assertion in this system should be accepted over a rival claim.
Xenophanes and Heraclitus cut rather a different pair of profiles. Here, too, we suffer from the patchy, haphazard manner in which their words have come down to us; in what survives we can catch some glimpses of argumentation, but any evaluation of the discursive architecture of these thinkers’ expressions is necessarily speculative. What seems certain is that the argumentative support for individual claims advanced by these two thinkers is unquestionably more developed. Xenophanes uses reductio arguments, notably in Fragment 15;Footnote 37 Heraclitus uses various hypothetical arguments, as in fragments 7 and 23.Footnote 38
Nevertheless, even one of the staunchest defenders of a rationalist Xenophanes admits that, while ‘some fragments contain logical connectives … and take the form of hypothetical argument, on the whole Xenophanes offers little by way of argument in support of specific conclusions’.Footnote 39 Nor do those who would see in his corpus a systematic account of physical phenomena and their causes claim that he supports these daring assertions with much in the way of argumentative justification. Rather, the novelty of the claims lies in their ostensibly systematic nature and scope, not in their being systematically advanced or defended.Footnote 40
It is not easy to assess from Heraclitus’ fragments how systematic his argumentation was, or what the report that Heraclitus wrote a ‘book’ might imply.Footnote 41 The view summarized by Barnes three decades ago remains the generally received wisdom:
Heraclitus was an aphorist; he did not produce periodic prose or write in continuous chapters; rather, he unburdened himself in the aphoristic form of instruction, by way of short and allusive sentences. No doubt he wrote ‘a book.’ But his ‘book’ was no treatise; rather, it had the outward look of the Hippocratic Aphorisms or of Democritus’ collection of gnomes.Footnote 42
Even a leading proponent of the view that Heraclitus’ corpus forms a carefully composed unity envisages this formal ordering of the whole ‘on the analogy of the great choral odes, with their fluid but carefully articulated movement from image to aphorism, from myth to riddle to contemporary allusion’; on this view, supporting a presumed ‘central theme, … hen panta einai’, we find ‘a chain of statements linked together not by logical argument but by interlocking ideas, imagery, and verbal echoes’.Footnote 43 Likewise, one of the most recent attempts to ‘protect … the rationalism of Heraclitus’ concedes ‘a lack of intrinsic order among the fragments of Heraclitus’ which may well ‘stand to one another in no particular order or bear no intrinsic relation to one another, logically or syntactically’.Footnote 44
What we find, then, in the case of the Milesians is, most likely, a relatively high degree of discursive systematicity but relatively little argumentation. In Xenophanes and Heraclitus, meanwhile, there are hints of a somewhat more developed level of argumentation, at least at the level of individual claims,Footnote 45 but what we do not seem to find is much evidence of discursive systematicity.
By contrast, the rhetorical schema dictated by the figure of the hodos offers a discursive framework that makes possible a single discursive unity that both accommodates a number of different textual units (unlike in Xenophanes and Heraclitus) and the linking together of these units in such a way as to suggest, and build upon, their necessary connection (unlike in the Milesian cosmologies). Studies of Parmenides’ accomplishment emphasize both the systematicity of his discourse and its thoroughly argumentative character;Footnote 46 I suggest that it is his use of the figure of the hodos that, by providing a discursive framework that can accommodate both features, makes this combination possible.
Importantly, Parmenides’ use of argumentation operates at what we might deem to be two levels. Just as the decision in the krisis in Fragment 2 is supported by (condensed and skeletal) argumentative justification, so each of the four claims advanced in the course of Fragment 8 is defended by argumentative support of varying extensiveness and comprehensiveness (viz. at the level of types of dependence). But these claims – and their supporting argumentation – are also linked to fragments 2, 6, and 7 (viz. at the level of rhetorical schemata) and, on some readings, also to each other, a question to which we shall return in Section 6.3. It is the potential movement along both axes – down the level of dependence and across the level of rhetorical schemata – that helps make Parmenides’ achievement what it is; and it is the hodos – which, unlike the genealogy or the stand-alone argument, accommodates and organizes relationships along both axes – that makes this possible.
6.2 Sēma II: Discursive Architecture and Temporality
What does this mean in terms of the discourse modes associated with the rhetorical schema of the hodos and the types of dependence it dictates? Before examining the specific relationships obtaining between the different fragments and the arguments of Fragment 8, it will be necessary to address aspects of Parmenides’ hodos of inquiry in relation to two other dimensions of import for the history of thought. Against the backdrop of the deep continuities between the discursive architecture of the hodos in Homer and Parmenides, we may also note some changes of extraordinary significance.
We saw that in the Odyssey, the enumeration of an itinerary of a hodos is usually a narrative affair (Section 3.2). This is reflected at the textual level insofar as episodes are linked together by temporal adverbs (e.g. πρῶτα, κεῖθεν, ἔπειτα), and by verbs whose features are closely associated with narration: verbs in the aorist, or in the future or historic present tense; and verbs in the imperative mood and/or second person – the language of time-bound activities that unfold in the course of, and themselves constitute, narrative action. These features suggest that the manner in which the text itself progresses has an irreducibly temporal component: the sequence of items as they appear in the text unfold along temporal lines (i.e. they are related to the passage of time in the story-world). This in turn is connected to the fact that ‘the temporal order in which events happen’ – the underlying events depicted by the narrative, which in turn unfolds along temporal lines according to the passage of time in the story-world – ‘is significant’.Footnote 47
Parmenides’ Fragment 8, however, bears little trace of these narrative textual features linking the ‘episodes’ of the sēmata. Instead of the hemistiches πρῶτα μὲν ἐς Πύλον ἐλθὲ (Od. 1.284), κεῖθεν δὲ Σπάρτηνδε (Od. 1.285), and νοστήσας δὴ ἔπειτα (Od. 1.291), or Σειρῆνας μὲν πρῶτον ἀφίξεαι (Od. 12.39), αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν δή (Od. 12.55), and Θρινακίην δ᾽ ἐς νῆσον ἀφίξεαι (Od. 12.127), the opening units of the sēmata in Fragment 8 begin, for example: οὐδέ ποτ’ ἦν οὐδ’ ἔσται (Fr. 8.5), and οὐδὲ διαιρετόν ἐστιν (Fr. 8.22).Footnote 48 We do not find the adverbial markers that indicate a temporal progression of text or event, just as we find none of the aorist, imperative, and/or second-person forms of narration or instruction that link the textual units of the hodoi of Odyssey 10 or 12. Although we do find verbs in the past and in future tense in line 8.5, these are both rejected in favour of the third person singular indicative timeless (or even eternal) presentFootnote 49 (formally akin to what we find at line 8.22): ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν ὁμοῦ πᾶν | ἕν, συνεχές (Fr. 8.5–6). And at the top level of dependence, we find few actions, and none for which the sequence of events depicted by them is significant. In the hodos detailed by Parmenides’ goddess, the narrative framework that links the various units of the hodos to each other – expressed in Odyssey 12 in the second person future indicative verbs of prophetic utterance – has vanished (a dynamic to be discussed at greater length in Section 6.2.2.1 below; see Figure 6.2).
By contrast, verbs in the third person singular indicative omnitemporal present correspond perfectly to the characteristics attributed to ‘description’ given above (see sections 3.1.2 and 3.2.3). Moreover, the opening hemistiches introducing the first and second sēmata (sēma-qua-‘argumentation proper’) also fulfil the very same functions of description – namely, introducing elements of the story-world and attributing qualities to them – that we have identified (see Section 3.1.2). Not only are these opening hemistiches of sēmata 1 and 2 formally similar to the ‘description’ portions of Circe’s hodos but they also perform the same function of attributing qualities.
These observations regarding description approach a larger nexus of topics which will form much of the remainder of the chapter. They can be examined from two perspectives. The first, to be addressed in the remainder of this section, concerns Parmenides’ place in the history of thought: what is at stake in the deployment of the figure of the hodos at this particular phase of Presocratic thought? What possibilities and resources might it afford to one who exploits it, how do these work, and why might they be useful? Second, to be addressed in Section 6.3, ‘Sēma III’: in what ways might this figure actually operate in the sequence spanning fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8 and in Fragment 8 itself? Finally, in Section 6.4, ‘Sēma IV’, I shall attempt to draw some conclusions and assess their implications for our understanding of Parmenides’ poem.
6.2.1 Ontology, Epistemology, Discourse
6.2.1.1 Ontology: No Time, Like the Present
Eric Havelock considered one challenge facing the early Presocratics to be the following: ‘aside altogether from the coinage of abstract nouns, the conceptual task … also required the elimination of verbs of doing and acting and happening, one may even say of living and dying, in favor of a syntax which states permanent relationships between conceptual terms systematically.’Footnote 50 This syntax, marked by the use of verbs in the third person omnitemporal present indicative, is in fact closely related to the kind we have been trying to capture under the rubric of ‘description’.Footnote 51 More specifically: ‘[f]or this purpose the required linguistic mechanism was furnished by the timeless present of the verb to be – the copula of analytic statement. The angles are equal to two right angles. They are not born that way or become or are made so.’Footnote 52
Complementing this claim at the level of individual words and discourse modes are others operative at the level of rhetorical schema. These centre around the benefits that arise from elminating the narrative frames formed by ‘verbs of doing and acting and happening’ (e.g. ἐλθέ, νοστήσας, ἀφίξεαι). Pertinent here are Kirk’s observations concerning certain basic elements of epic and myth evolving out of the oral tradition: ‘it is events, not permanent relationships, that are their currency.’Footnote 53 He continues:
when tales concern themselves with the nature of the outside world, they do so in personal and genealogical terms of the kind used by Hesiod and his sources in the Theogony. That is not only because of the inclination of the tales … to animate, to anthropomorphize … but also because the development of action requires … diachronic not synchronic terms … history rather than philosophy or science … The language of the Theogony is, typically, the language of sequence; aorist rather than present tenses predominate … even when Hesiod is trying to set out the conditions of the present world, he is constantly driven back on personification and myth – on personification indeed because of the need for myth, not just because he is taking refuge in tradition but rather because he simply does not know how to describe (quite apart from vocabulary matters) a dynamic complex without interrelating its components in a historical manner.Footnote 54
The verbal and other features of description do not merely provide a useful medium through which to express ‘permanent relations between conceptual terms’, that is; being liberated from presenting the world in terms of temporally pregnant events (which necessarily unfold according to a narrative sequence), it therefore becomes possible to conceptualize a reality not already woven from a temporally charged fabric, a warp of being not already meshed with the weft of becoming.Footnote 55
Denarrativizing the framework within which an account of reality can be expressed and finding a discursive structure that both accomplishes this and maintains the ability to order its contents systematically (as discussed in the last section) are of obvious importance for a thinker who would abolish change and dynamic activity from reality.Footnote 56 The figure of the hodos plays the decisive role here.
First, regarding Havelock’s claims, we may now return to the observations made in Section 4.2.2, concerning the high proportion of description and the frequency with which forms of einai (and esti in particular) appear in the krisis portion of Circe’s hodos. In Od. 12.55–126, precisely what we do find are the ostensibly permanent relationships whose importance Havelock stressed. Moreover, and evocatively, many of them are expressed via copula or copula-like forms of the third person present indicative form of einai (see Section 4.2.2.1.1, ‘Einai’, above); whatever we may make of this fact, we may also observe that if Parmenides needed a model for expressing the kinds of enduring facts about the world discussed by Havelock, in this part of the Odyssey he would have found a very useful set of discursive building blocks waiting ready to hand.Footnote 57
Second, the figure of the hodos provides for sections of indefinite length to be pegged onto, or depend from, the narrative framing that linked distinct units of text (Section 3.2.3), sections typically formed of description. These description portions in turn offer the possibility of articulating relationships between objects in the world that would be potentially unbound by temporal considerations; this in turn could also take on a particularly abstract, conceptual colouring (e.g. Od. 12.118–19, 12.109–10).Footnote 58 Parmenides exploits this possibility in the course of Fragment 8 and his hodos dizēsios. From a discursive perspective, what we find in Parmenides’ reworking and reconfiguring of the Homeric figure of the hodos is (a) an elimination of the narrative frame, and (b) a corresponding expansion of the description sections, with their omnitemporal presents and frequent uses of einai, especially in the third person present singular indicative.
This moves us in the direction of Kirk’s point. The language used in Od. 12.55–126 in particular suggests that the world Circe’s hodos traverses is simply there, with stable, unchanging features that are simple givens: Scylla’s rock simply is smooth (12.79); her cave, like the fig tree above Charybdis, simply is there (12.103). It simply is not possible to defend against Scylla (12.120); the evil she represents just is immortal (12.118). There is no question ‘of verbs of doing or acting or happening’ penetrating this timeless space of the Apologoi: the syntax and diction suggest that this is a topography untouched by change, that its basic features just are.Footnote 59
The point is underscored by Circe’s rebuke to Odysseus when he asks what he can do to defend against Scylla. There is, the goddess makes clear, simply nothing to be done.Footnote 60 Circe goes so far as to couch her conclusion through negations and in a modally inflected idiom: οὐδέ τις ἔστ᾽ ἀλκή (Od. 12.120). That in turn stems from the brute fact that not only is Scylla unchanging, immortal, but in an abstract sense, ‘the evil’ itself just is, for it, too, is deathless, unchanging, indefatigable (Od. 12.118–19):
Would-be champions who want to protect their crew can do what they like, but Odysseus must confront the fact that not only does the landscape through which the two possible hodoi would take him not change, it appears in this case to be categorically unchangeable.Footnote 61
This immutability plays an important role in articulating and establishing the limits of Odysseus’ ability to influence the world around him.Footnote 62 But the limits of Odysseus’ own powers are only half of this equation – it is the transcendent fixity, the absolute immunity to change of the world traversed in Od. 12.55–126 that defines these limits by imposing on Odysseus’ powers insurmountable obstacles. The Planctae, Scylla, Charybdis: the landscape and its features not only simply are as they are, unchanging, they are, as far as Odysseus is concerned, unchangeable.Footnote 63
6.2.1.2 Epistemology: Searching-in-Time and the hodos dizēsios
There is another side to this point. Although the rhetorical schema of the hodos offers a discursive framework that allows for the withdrawal of temporality, change, genesis, and destruction from the constitution of the landscape it traverses, and although the narrative frames linking the textual units that form the itinerary of the hodoi in the Odyssey have been removed from the hodos of Parmenides’ goddess (see Section 6.2, ‘Sēma II: Discursive Architecture and Temporality’), we have also seen above (Section 3.2.2c) that an inherent feature of the mechanics of the rhetorical schema of the hodos is to order the entries it catalogues in a sequential way – to form a series, not a list.Footnote 64 Just how this works and what this means in Parmenides’ poem we shall examine shortly (see Section 6.2.1.3, ‘Discourse’ below); in the meantime, we must observe that the temporal sequentiality, withdrawn from the inner workings and constitution of the story-world, does not, pace Kirk, disappear from the story of Parmenides’ hodos dizēsios. Instead, what we find with respect to the place of movement and change in time in the hodos dizēsios is a kind of fascinating double move.
In fact, it is not that temporality disappears from the picture altogether when it is withdrawn from the fabric of the world; rather, this temporal dimension is instead displaced to a different aspect of the story-world. Here we must pivot our attention from ontology to epistemology. Of the pre-Parmenidean epistemological history discussed at length in Chapter 2, scholars of the Presocratics emphasize one particular strand that may be summarized as follows.Footnote 65 An old ‘poetic pessimism’, to be found in Homer, Hesiod, and early lyric and expressing a kind of archaic ‘folk epistemology’, had posited a fundamental dichotomy between the severely constrained knowledge independently available to mortals and the comprehensive knowledge possessed by divinities. Divinities could, however, grant privileged access to knowledge to favoured mortals, such as a poet who has made a special appeal to the Muses. This access was to be granted all at once in the form of an instantaneous revelation rather than an incrementally unfolding process of enlightenment. For those who took him seriously, the epistemological critiques advanced by Xenophanes would terminate this possibility by making divinity and the divine perspective – characterized by certain knowledge, to saphes – radically inaccessible to mortals. Even in the best of circumstances, all that would remain to the mortals trapped beneath this epistemic ceiling is an inferior level of understanding: that of dokos, belief.Footnote 66 But though dokos is ‘available to all’ (Xenophanes’ Fr. 34), not all dokos is created equal (Fr. 18):
Although what precisely ‘searching’ (zēteō) means here is disputed, the consensus is that the activity denoted has a distinctively empirical cast (akin, perhaps, to historiē).Footnote 68 If this ‘searching’ for knowledge can never exceed or transcend the realm of dokos, the possibility for intellectual progress is not ruled out, either: there is better and worse belief, and ‘searching’ in the right way still leads to advances within this domain of dokos.Footnote 69 What is more, this searching yields progress ‘in time’ (χρόνῳ ζητοῦντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον).
On this understanding, what we find in Xenophanes is: (a) a complete rupture between the domain of mortals and that of the divine, with severely constricting epistemological consequences for man;Footnote 70 (b) a claim that this rupture can nevertheless be mitigated (though never fully repaired) through ‘searching’; (c) a claim that this searching yields better results gradually and in the course of time; (d) a conception of this ‘searching’ that takes on an empirical (though not necessarily systematic) colouring. Situating Parmenides against this backdrop reveals the significance of his notion of a hodos dizēsios (as opposed to, say, an instantaneous revelation) in a useful light. If ‘the radical archaic division between “full knowledge by divine revelation” and “complete human ignorance without it” is inimical to inquiry’, then:
So far as Parmenides accepted the human ‘quest’ … as our default mode of gaining knowledge, he endorsed an epistemic paradigm [viz. that posited by Xenophanes] that is conceptually in tension with one in which humans might be granted a sudden and complete insight into truth by divine help.Footnote 71
That is, ‘the central role of the interconnected motifs of “the route” and of “the quest” imply that … he subscribed to the new model of “seeking” knowledge’ through an incremental process that plays out ‘in the course of time’.Footnote 72
Invoking Mourelatos’s dictum – ‘The image of the route mediates a new concept of the nature of thinking and knowing’ – Mogyoródi suggests that part of this ‘novelty … might also be found in its temporal (as opposed to some instantaneous) nature’.Footnote 73 Here we see the second part of the ‘double move’ mentioned above: the figure of the hodos allows Parmenides to withdraw temporality and dynamism from the constitution of the world and reality – that is, from the ontological and/or cosmological domain – by offering an outlet for this temporality at the epistemological domain, now conceptualized as a quest for knowledge in the form of the hodos dizēsios. For Parmenides, as for Xenophanes, knowledge is no longer something that can fall from the sky in an instant, but instead requires a temporally extended process; unlike Xenophanes’ ‘searching in time’, however, this process does not take on an empirical cast – which Parmenides in fact flatly rejects (cf. fragments 6 and 7) – but operates instead through logos and the goddess’s ‘much-contested elenchus’ through the form of the hodos dizēsios.Footnote 74 Finally, this hodos dizēsios repairs the link, severed by Xenophanes’ critiques, between limited human knowledge and the certain knowledge possessed by gods; by travelling it, mortals can attain access to certain knowledge (cf. Fr. 1.28–29 and discussion in Section 2.4 above).
It is also stimulating to consider the matter the other way round. With the temporal dimension inherent to narrative safely displaced to the human movement of the epistemological quest or hodos dizēsios, the story-world itself is able to remain unaffected by the temporality and change inherent in a genealogical narrative of coming-to-be. Liberated from the need to form the narrative backbone of a genealogy, the constituent elements of the world are now left free to be as static and immutable as Scylla is to Odysseus. This in turn opens the door for what we might call, perhaps a bit grandly, a conception of the ontological as such, an understanding of things as things with stable, unchanging, or even potentially timeless qualities. And again, the rhetorical schema of the hodos, which accommodates description sections, even – or especially – long ones, in its levels of dependence, both makes this possible in the first place, and also (as Od. 12.55–126 shows) provides a language and a discursive means for this to be expressed.
6.2.1.3 Discourse: Another Narratological Sleight of Hand
There is a third, vital turn here. We examined above (6.2.1.1, ‘Ontology’) how the temporality inherent to narration functions differently in the story-world when the narrative in question concerns travelling a hodos, rather than expounding a genealogy (be it theo- or cosmo- gonical). The temporality woven into the genealogically based world of becoming is withdrawn from the objects in the world itself, notably the features of the landscape traversed. This temporality does not vanish, though, but is displaced to the human level of travel through the now-static landscape. In Parmenides’ hodos, the temporal dimension of narration is thus channelled to the level of the human inquiry for knowledge, the epistemological story of the hodos dizēsios, leaving behind a static world available for conceptualization in terms of stable, unchanging beings or being (see 6.2.1.2, ‘Epistemology’). But what does this mean for the question of the orderliness of the goddess’s discourse, for its ostensible narrativity (despite its lack of narrative elements; see again Section 6.2, ‘Sēma II: Discursive Architecture and Temporality’) on account of its use of the rhetorical schema of the hodos, and thus its apparent status as a series rather than a list?
As in Chapter 2 (Section 2.4.4, ‘Narrators and Voices’), addressing this question presents us with yet another astonishing narratological sleight of hand by Parmenides, one as discreet as its consequences are momentous. This complex narratological manoeuvre has a number of components that need to be unpacked.
6.2.1.3.1 Plot and Story
Recall that one of the essential features of the rhetorical schema governed by the figure of the hodos is that, at least in some fundamental respects, the movement of the plot tracks movement in the story-world (see Section 3.1.2 above). Though this is also true in a very important way in Odyssey 12, the underlying dynamics there are, in fact, considerably more complex. On the one hand, Circe’s direct speech in Odyssey 12.37–141 looks forward to the journey that Odysseus must (and, as we see in the second half of Odyssey 12, eventually does) take to get back to Ithaca. On the other, this encounter with Circe takes place in the Apologoi, which Odysseus recounts to his Phaeacian hosts some seven-odd years after the events in question occurred.Footnote 75 Od. 12.37–141 is thus a prospective narration (by Circe) narrated retrospectively (by Odysseus). Finally, because Odysseus is himself a secondary narrator, the tales that make up Odyssey 9–12 are themselves ultimately embedded within the larger tale of the Odyssey narrated by the primary narrator, epic poet.Footnote 76
Though they are similar in some respects to what we find in Od.12.37–141, in Parmenides’ poem and the ‘Route to Truth’ portion specifically, the narratological dynamics and their attendant levels of temporality are at once both more and less complex. They are similar in that the goddess’s speech in Fragment 2 and following is in some respects also a kind of prospective narration, as the goddess’s remarks in the future tense, such as mathēseai (Fr. 1.31) and ereō (Fr. 2.1), intimate. Likewise, thanks to the framing device of the proem, which is rife with classic narrative elements, we also find a retrospective element to the kouros’s narration.Footnote 77 The narratological dynamics of Parmenides’ poem are less complex, meanwhile, in that, unlike in Odyssey 9–12, the mortal first-person narrator is its primary narrator, not a secondary narrator embedded in a larger story told by an epic poet. But the scenario in Parmenides’ poem is also more complex in that, as we noted above (Section 6.2, ‘Sēma II: Discursive Architecture and Temporality’), the narrative frames that introduce the individual hodos-units forming the itinerary of Od. 12.39–141 (12.39a, 12.55a, 12.127a) have been eliminated in Parmenides’ hodos dizēsios. The goddess no longer tells the kouros what he will do, as Circe tells Odysseus what he is to do (and as, thanks to the retrospective quality of his narration, we see that Odysseus actually did); instead, she simply enumerates the items or ‘places’ that make up the itinerary, a series of facts about the story-world itself, rather than about the events to which they will be witness or party.
This shift is as radical as it is subtle. In Odyssey 12, it is the prospective journey of Odysseus that provides the temporal dimension of the rhetorical schema of the hodos.Footnote 78 Ultimately, Odysseus does move through the story-world of the Apologoi in Odyssey 12, a sequence of events of crucial importance for the rest of the story of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and the successful completion of his nostos. But what is the corresponding movement through the ‘story-world’ in Parmenides’ poem? The goddess gives the kouros a map of the domain through which he must journey, but stating a sequence of facts about the poem’s ‘story-world’ is not the same thing as saying that the kouros will or does actually make this journey in fragments 2–8 – and far less is it the same as hearing about the occasion in the past when he did successfully undertake this journey, as in the second half of Odyssey 12. In Parmenides’ poem there is no clear equivalent to the events of the journey Odysseus needs to make, and does in fact make; the goddess does not mention the kouros’s movement through the story-world whose layout she describes, nor do we ever hear of his moving through it. We saw above (Section 3.2.3) that it is the fact that the order of events is significant that gives narration the order characteristic of narrativity. But in Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’, there are simply no events whose order could be significant in the first place.
The rather stunning upshot is that, rather than the movement of the ‘plot’ of Parmenides’ poem tracking or corresponding to movement through the story-world, something close to the opposite happens. Stripped of any underlying movement in the story-world to track, the plot in effect produces such a movement as it progresses and in virtue of its progressing. In the ‘Route to Truth’, that is, it is the sequential, ordered movement of plot or discourse itself that replaces key aspects of the ordered sequentiality usually generated by the underlying actions and events in the story-world.
6.2.1.3.2 The Time of the Story-World and the Time of Narration
Why should this matter? If the last point concerned the relationship between the movement of plot and movement in the story-world, we must also consider the relationship between the story-worlds and the ‘real time’ of the poem’s narration.Footnote 79 Again, we need to observe a few preliminary points, this time about the story-world of Odyssey 12 and Parmenides’ poem. Unsurprisingly, the hodos we find in Odyssey 12 is defined by a great deal of specificity. The characters are specific – Odysseus, son of Laertes, father to Telemachus, hero and master spokesman and strategist of the Achaean army, is told by Circe, daughter of Helios, dread goddess endowed with speech, of the journey he must take to get back to Ithaca. The places that form the itinerary are also specific, being named and described in the laborious detail we have examined above (Chapter 4); some of them, such as the Wandering Rocks, might even have been well-known from other traditional myths, and whatever classic expositions they may have had.Footnote 80 And though the time frame of events is slightly less specific, we know we are roughly one year and two months or so after Odysseus’ departure from the ruins of Troy.Footnote 81
Not so in Parmenides’ poem. There, the specific identities of everything, everywhere, everyone is famously – or infamously – vague. Just who is the unnamed goddess?Footnote 82 Just where does one have to go to find her – up? Down? Beyond?Footnote 83 Who, really, is the kouros, about whom we know essentially nothing?Footnote 84 When is this all supposed to have happened? It is almost as if Parmenides, to much subsequent wailing and gnashing of teeth, had tried to keep matters as vague as possible.Footnote 85
Whatever Parmenides’ intentions may have been, the effects of this comprehensive, indeed almost systematic, vagueness are striking. Important here is the fundamentally dialectical structure of the poem from the moment the kouros makes contact with the goddess.Footnote 86 This is also a feature of Circe’s speech to Odysseus, delivered in her own voice,Footnote 87 and directly to her interlocutor;Footnote 88 deeply embedded in the rest of the Apologoi and the rest of the Odyssey as this is, however, the audience would have had little occasion to forget that it is this specific divine character, Circe, who speaks to this specific mortal hero, Odysseus, and that she does so on her home island of Aeaea. By contrast, the relatively brief twenty-three lines of the proem that precede the speech of Parmenides’ anonymous goddess, however, exert a far flimsier anchoring force than the eleven books of the Odyssey that precede the exchange with Circe; nor is this strengthened by the specific qualities of the Beyond she inhabits (for there are so few), nor by the goddess’s specific qualities (for she has so few), nor by the specific attributes of the kouros to whom she speaks (for what are they?).
Why does this matter? The action narrated in the Apologoi, and indeed the entire Odyssey, took place in the Age of Heroes, not long after the sack of Troy. It is separated from Hesiod’s age, the Age of Iron, by an unbridgeable gulf.Footnote 89 But what of the world of Parmenides’ kouros? Is there any reason to think the world he leaves behind is so different from our own? Much more to the point: is the kouros himself so different from us, the audience, that we could not identify with him?Footnote 90 What, ultimately, separates him and his world from that of the audience? When the goddess speaks in the second person, what is to stop us from asking to whom she is really speaking? Without the ballast of nearly half of the Odyssey to precede it, untethered by the specificities of names, times, and places, could not her words mean as much to any audience – including ourselves – as they do to the kouros? The extreme generality of the dramatic scenario, which in many of its aspects seems so carefully wrought, in fact reduces, blurs, effaces the differences between the world of the story and that of the narrator as much as possible – or rather, thanks to this carefully crafted generality, no such gulf emerges in the first place. With these strategies – (i) the extraordinarily unspecific dramatic scenario and characters; (ii) the brief proem; (iii) the first-person narration unembedded in a poem about the epic past; (iv) the removal of the narrative frames between the episodes; (v) the efforts to encourage the audience to associate with the kouros; and, most of all, (vi) the goddess’s use of second person forms in direct speech – Parmenides renders the divide between the story-world and the world of the audience as flimsy, insubstantial, and unobtrusive as possible.
With this in mind, the dialectical qualities of the poem take on a special new power in the portions of extended direct speech where the goddess speaks in the second person.Footnote 91 Once the opening twenty or so lines of the proem and their narrative frame fade from view, we find ourselves in a discursive scenario where the goddess effectively addresses herself directly to the audience – any audience, at any time – of the poem as much as to the kouros. (Indeed, her claim in Fr. 2.7–8 that ‘you could not apprehend or indicate what-is-not as such’Footnote 92 would necessarily be just as true for you, reader, as for me, for the original audience, or the kouros – and this is the very source of its power.)Footnote 93 Taken all together, these manoeuvres produce the appearance of yet another collapse of temporalities, this time involving the reduction of the temporality of the story to the temporality of the moment of narration – or, better yet, a rendering coextensive of the temporality of the story with the temporality of the moment of narration.
6.2.1.3.3 Discourse: Conclusions
To sum up: since, as we have seen, movement in the world of the story is already produced by, and thus coextensive with, the sequential movement of discourse of the poem’s ‘plot’, with the collapse between the time of the story-world and that of the time of the poem’s narration, all three temporalities appear to collapse into each other. It is not just, then, that movement in the quest-story of the hodos dizēsios is at once produced by, and also constitutes, the level of plot or discourse; astonishingly, each time a listener hears the poem or a reader reads it, the listener or reader travels the same hodos dizēsios in the very act of proceeding through the ‘plot’ of the poem. In an important sense, the movement through the story-world of Parmenides’ poem occurs any and every time the poem is heard or read.
Three consequences of colossal importance stem from this. The first is that it is the movement of plot in real time – in the time of narration, which is also the same as the time of the plot, and also, in effect, the same as the time of the story-world – that activates or imparts the temporal dimension to the underlying spatial order of the itinerary of the goddess’s hodos. Narration-time, plot-time, and story-time become one; the hodos dizēsios that Parmenides offers in response to Xenophanes, that is, is undertaken in the very act of performing (or reading) the poem itself.Footnote 94
Second, and related to this, is a more nuanced insight into the dynamics discussed above in Section 6.2.1.1, ‘Ontology’. In embodying a temporally extended process of epistemological quest, Parmenides’ hodos dizēsios allows the landscape through which it passes to remain static and uninfected by the time, change, and activity intrinsic to narration (see Section 3.1.2). No narration is necessary in fragments 2, 6, 7, or 8, since the temporal aspect inherent in narration is played by the movement of the plot – that is the argument – in the ‘real time’ of its being narrated.
Third, and also a consequence of the first point, in the act of proceeding through the ‘Route to Truth’, any narrator or reader preserves the narrativity of this portion of Parmenides’ poem – its series-like, ordered sequentiality – without requiring any narrative elements (as defined above – see again Section 3.1.2); the ‘temporal’ part of the spatio-temporal con-sequence that we saw above was a defining feature of the rhetorical schema of the hodos (see sections 3.2.2c, 3.2.3) is thus provided by the sequential movement of the plot, not the sequence of events of the story.
6.2.2 Discursive Architecture and Temporality: Conclusions
Putting everything together, we may say the following. With regard to Havelock’s point, in Odyssey 12, the discursive organization dictated by the figure of the hodos offers a kind of syntax that allows for the expression of even quite abstract, ostensibly permanent relations, and not merely the depiction of actions. This is because, unlike a genealogically based conception of reality, the figure of the hodos offers a rhetorical schema that does not intrinsically require that the basic fabric of the world be constituted by time-bound, temporally pregnant entities; as a result, it allows for a kind of withdrawal of narrative dynamism – of agent and action – from a landscape whose fundamental features may be rendered inert, unchanging, fixed, and stable. It is this transition that opens the door to what we might call ontology proper, to a world of being, rather than, at best, genealogy’s world of things-having-once-become. In short, the rhetorical schema of the figure of the hodos offers a discursive framework that preserves the rigorous sequential ordering of items – that is, the formation of a series, not a list – but allows for the elimination of narrative frames while preserving the textual features of description. This is a discursive framework, that is, that allows for narrativity without narration and description without the unordered, list-like quality of descriptivity. It is this that is meant when, cribbing Mourelatos, one asserts that the rhetorical schema of the hodos offers a discursive architecture mediating the transition to a new way of asserting, arguing, persuading.
6.3 Sēma III: Hodopoiēsis (the ‘Route to Truth’ and Fragment 8)
We have just seen how the movement of plot, not movement in the story-world, provides the temporal dimension of the spatio-temporal con-sequence that dictates the order in which the rhetorical schema of the hodos catalogues its entries. But what of the spatial side of that equation? Is there such a thing as spatial contiguity with respect to items in the underlying ‘story-world’ that makes up fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8?
Some readers of Parmenides’ Fragment 5 would suggest not. Karsten, for example, understood the fragment to refer to the different hodoi on offer in the course of the poem;Footnote 95 as later scholars have pointed out, if one accepts that these number three, or at least that one of them corresponds to the Doxa section, this understanding of Fragment 5 ‘asks us to believe that Parmenides could have altered the order in which he examines these three Ways’.Footnote 96 There is no reason, then, that Doxa need be read after the ‘Route to Truth’, and it is not necessarily clear that Fragment 2 need precede fragments 6 and 7, nor that these in turn precede Fragment 8. The items that make up Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ – and indeed the post-proem poem proper – might well form a list, then, plain and simple. On this view, there would be no underlying geography to Parmenides’ story-world at all.
Scholars of Parmenides rarely find time these days to refute this view, much less to hold it.Footnote 97 There are at least three reasons for this. Briefly: first, certain elements of the poem would become difficult to explain; were it not the case that all other possible hodoi (whether one or two) had already been ruled out by the time Fragment 8 begins, what grounds could there be to declare (Fr. 8.1–2):Footnote 98
Second, parts of Fragment 8 would appear to indicate expressly that they are to come after the krisis announced either in Fragment 2 or a combination of fragments 2, 6, and 7 (8.15–18):
As the perfect tense (κέκριται) suggests, at this stage in poem, the decision between the two hodoi has already been made.
Third, as all commentators agree, the argumentation found in lines 8.5–21 (or 8.6–21), for example, depends entirely on the points established in these earlier fragments: the two arguments offered against coming-to-be, a ‘semantic-epistemological’ rejection of ‘what-is-not’ (Fr. 8.7–8) and the ban on genesis ex nihilo (Fr. 8.6–7, 9–10) both presuppose passage by way of the first (and potentially second) kris(e)is.Footnote 100 It is clear, then, that Fragment 8 must come after fragments 2, 6, and 7.
What is more, on any interpretation involving a second krisis in fragments 6 and 7, it is crucially important that the second krisis (fragments 6 and 7) comes after the first (Fragment 2).Footnote 101 On many of these interpretations, the mutually implicated revelation of being and not-being in Fragment 2 is a necessary precondition to any consideration of the possibility mooted in Fragment 6; for scholars who advocate such a reading, it is only after having attempted to think or indicate to ge mē eon that it becomes possible to conceive of a path that features both ‘IS’ and ‘IS NOT’.Footnote 102 On this reading, the three units, Fragment 2, fragments 6 and 7, and Fragment 8.5–21, do proceed according to a regular ordering principle. Put differently, since it seems essential that fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8.1–21 be placed in this order, we may say that there is some kind of a fixed, underlying map of the ‘story-world’ the goddess describes. The catalogue they form, that is, must be deemed a series, not a list.
So far, so good. But what about the relationship between the sēmata themselves? A goddess enumerating a hodos back home to Ithaca is constrained by the geography of the world this hodos traverses. Instead of events tied to places, however, the hodos of Parmenides’ goddess orders claims, predicates that can (or, indeed, must) be predicated of to eon. But what dictates the placement of these claims in adjacent, contiguous locations in a hodos dizēsios? Is there also some underlying, pre-existing logical geography that dictates the sequence according to which these must be ordered? Or is it merely that the figure of the hodos imparts – imposes – the appearance of a reified necessity?
As at so many points of Parmenidean analysis, there is little consensus here. Perhaps the most prudent way to proceed is to examine readings that stake out two extreme positions on this question. Those advanced by G. E. L. Owen and David Sedley come as close to forming just such a pair as perhaps can be found.Footnote 103 Furthermore, because these two readings share similar views of several major features of Parmenides’ argumentative structure – each regards the argument of Fragment 8 as made of four distinct arguments corresponding to the four sēmata presented above (lines 8.5/6–21, 8.22–25, 8.26–33, and 8.42–49, respectively) – they are especially easy to compare.
It is worth emphasizing here yet again that my chief aim is not to provide a comprehensive, exhaustive analysis of Parmenides’ specific arguments but to understand the larger shape and structure of the argumentation. Accordingly, the following discussion of Parmenides’ arguments will be undertaken with a view to articulating the possible relationships between each of the different elements that form it – that is, the relationships between each of the four sēmata, and between different sēmata and the arguments of fragments 2, 6, and 7.
Sedley, who would rehabilitate the views that Parmenides is a ‘radical cosmologist’ and that to eon is ‘the sphere that constitutes … the world of mortals’, proposes an ‘unashamedly spatial reading’ of Fragment 8.Footnote 104 He extracts ‘two Laws’ from fragments 2, 6, and 7. The second of these crystallizes the substance of Fragment 2: ‘No proposition is true if it implies that, for any x, “x is not” is, was or will be true.’Footnote 105 The first gestures towards a law of non-contradiction, and also seems to encapsulate Fragment 6: ‘There are no half-truths. No proposition is both true and false. No question can be coherently answered “Yes and no”.’Footnote 106 With these ‘Laws’ in hand, Sedley summarizes his view of the argumentative structure of Fragment 8 thusly:
Once the choice of paths was complete, the goddess took us through a series of largely independent proofs demonstrating each of the predicates of what-is. Only once did the conclusion of one proof serve as the premise for another, and that was (B8.27–28) when (a) the rejection of generation and perishing was invoked among the grounds for (c) denial of motion. Otherwise each proof was self-contained, its premises either presented as self-evident or relying on one or both Laws.Footnote 107
On Sedley’s interpretation of the arguments in Fragment 8.5–49, then, what we find is a scattering of separate, distinct points – points that, while ‘hard won by argument’, do not necessarily lead onto each other or rely on each other via an intrinsic sequence or pattern. Once one has traversed fragments 2, 6, and 7 in order, the sēmata in 8.3–4 could in theory be visited in any order (provided that sēma 1 is visited before sēma 3).Footnote 108
Contrast Owen’s assessment of Fragment 8: ‘Parmenides’ train of argument breaks into four main stages which are clearly distinguished and correctly ordered in the programme given at the start, and each succeeding movement is introduced by an epei-clause which … shows how the argument depends on a proposition already proved.’Footnote 109 That is, as Lloyd puts it, ‘the fragment forms a carefully articulated whole in which the later sections build on the conclusions of the earlier in an orderly sequence of argumentation’.Footnote 110
There is in fact less distance between Owen’s view and Sedley’s than may be suggested by Sedley’s characterization of Fragment 8 as consisting of ‘largely independent proofs’, each of which is ‘self-contained’. For Sedley, as for Owen, there is no question that fragments 2, 6, and 7 (captured in his notion of two Parmenidean ‘Laws’) come anywhere but before the four sēmata of Fragment 8. Likewise, if, at least as the argument now stands, sēma 3 would seem to come after sēma 1, this already eliminates a number of the possible sequences in which Parmenides might have ordered his sēmata.Footnote 111
For his part, Owen summarizes his views as follows: ‘in the third movement B 8.27 looks back to B 8.6–21 and especially to line 21’; ‘in the fourth B 8.42 looks back to B 8.26–33 and especially to lines 26 and 30–31’.Footnote 112 Reading line 8.22 as ἐπεὶ πᾶν ἔστιν ὁμοῖον (instead of ἐπεὶ πᾶν ἐστιν ὁμοῖον) and taking ὁμοῖον adverbially (viz. ‘exists without intermission’, rather than ‘is all alike’), Owen sees the proof elaborated in lines 8.22–5 as drawing its premise from the claims established at 8.11 and 8.15–18.Footnote 113 Of lines 8.6–21 he says less, but this is perhaps because the situation is in some respects more clear-cut.Footnote 114 Owen does not address the complexities surrounding the epei clause in lines 8.5–6, but in light of his earlier assertions,Footnote 115 a defender of Owen’s position might say that this is because Parmenides himself so thoroughly stitches the claims of fragments 2, 6, and 7 into the argumentation of lines 8.6–21 (even recapitulating matters at lines 8.15–8.18) that the relationship between the conclusions secured in earlier fragments and the premises of the argument put forward in the first ‘movement’ in Fragment 8 is essentially self-evident.
Owen’s view of the organization of Fragment 8, highly influential over the years but more contested of late, yields a striking vantage on the power the figure of the hodos exerts on the structure of Parmenides’ fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8. This view, that only once one has attained the first sēma – meaning either ‘signpost’ or ‘proof’, or bothFootnote 116 – can one begin to make headway in relation to the second or the third, and only once one has attained the third sēma can one set off on the final stage of the itinerary for the fourth, coincides with what above was described as the ‘strong reading’ of Parmenides’ Fragment 8; notably, it presumes a pre-existing underlying logical geography that defines the map of the ‘story-world’ of Fragment 8 in the way that a pre-existing underlying geography is presumed to define the story-world depicted by Circe in Odyssey 12. On Owen’s reading, we thus see the sēmata concretize, reify, and take root in a domain that claims the same sort of material thickness and free-standing reality as the story-world of the Odyssey, with its Sirens’ meadow, smooth cliffs, hardy fig tree, and so forth; now, however, this substantiality stands in the domain of the hodos dizēsios and the sēmata that mark out its course. Likewise, as the geography of the Odyssey’s story-world possesses a predetermined configuration within the universe of the story (so that Circe can map out the itinerary of Odysseus’ next sequence of adventures, but cannot reconfigure the map), and as the Sirens’ meadow only gives way to the pastures of the Sun’s cattle by way of the Planctae, Scylla, or Charybdis, so on this view one would get to the third point in the itinerary, the third landmark, the third signpost or sēma-object, only by way of the first, and to the fourth only by way of the third.
6.3.1 A Detour: The Bonds of Necessity and Logical Consequence
Or perhaps must get to the third, and then the fourth point in the itinerary. Why so? Odysseus’ journey is made by ship, across the trackless sea.Footnote 117 To cross this blank, unmarked space is to be perpetually threatened by the risk of planē – as nearly all the Achaean heroes returning from Troy can attest.Footnote 118 Where no path is visibly marked, aimless, directionless, backward-turning movement always remains possible.Footnote 119 But the kouros in Parmenides’ proem, as no one will have forgotten, travels by chariot. Furthermore, as is expressly specified in the proem, the chariot (ἅρμα, Fr. 1.5) travels on a ‘much-famed’ hodos (ὁδὸς πολύφημος, Fr. 1.2) and then, once through the portentous gates, ‘along a road-suitable-for-wheeled-traffic’ (κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν, Fr. 1.21). And this, as we saw above (Section 1.1), is highly significant.
To unpack this significance most effectively, let us advert once more to Mourelatos’s comments on the topic (discussed under the rubric of ‘the motif of chariotry’). Having examined what he calls the ‘motif of the-journey’ and the ‘theme of Fate-Constraint’,Footnote 120 Mourelatos airs the following anxieties:
The danger is that we may be left in the end with configurations of language which, although internally coherent when taken separately, might appear unrelated or even dissonant when compared to one another. Specifically, a combination of the-journey, chariotry, and binding has, at least prima facie, a certain baroque, eclectic, and syncretic quality; and that should make us suspicious. Can we in good conscience project a jumble of motifs into the imagination of a man who made his name in the history of ideas as an uncompromising defender of logic and unity?Footnote 121
This impression is misguided, he reassures us: ‘motifs which appear as dissonant or unrelated to us are, to the archaic mentality, strongly linked by ties of analogy and association’.Footnote 122 The connection between overland travel by wheeled vehicle and sea travel by ship is indeed no challenge to establish.Footnote 123 But Mourelatos struggles to connect the motif of chariotry and the motif of ‘the-journey’ to what he calls the theme of ‘Fate-Constraint’. He cites a few parallels between the language used to describe Odysseus as he is bound to the mast in the Sirens episode, to describe Poseidon’s hobbling his horses’ legs (Il. 13.37), and to make the case for the sēma akinēton at Parmenides’ Fragment 8.30–31. This does not ultimately carry him very far, however: ‘I am not suggesting that B8.30–31 envisages a convergence of the three ideas: hobbled horse, sailor strapped to the mast, sailor committed to his destination. My point is rather that the Homeric phrase has a certain suggestiveness and flexibility which allows modulation from one motif to another.’Footnote 124
This, surely, is a weak point in the argument. Mourelatos attempts to bolster his case by examining the etymology and semantics of words derived from telos, which offers a slightly less precarious connection between ‘the-journey’ motif and theme of ‘Fate-Constraint’.Footnote 125 Importantly, ‘the result of the deity’s “strapping” and “holding”’ – as expressed through the theme of the ‘Fate-Constraint’ – ‘is summed up, in the climactic section of B8, in the attribute tetelesmenon’.Footnote 126 The word may be seen to operate not only on the ontological level (as a description of the nature of to eon)Footnote 127 but also on the epistemological level: ‘In the order of knowing or thinking[,] the correct “route” is a “steadfast,” controlled route, “tied” or “committed” to its destination. This is the route that “consummates” the journey and “comes around” to the goal. On this journey the guide is the same Fate who bound what-is in straps.’Footnote 128 Finally, Mourelatos cashes out this analysis in the claim (complementary to the notion that ‘the image of the route mediates a new concept of the nature of thinking and knowing’) that ‘the transformation of the theme of Fate-Constraint is a projection which reaches toward the concept of logical or metaphysical necessity’.Footnote 129
As at several other important junctures, I both agree with Mourelatos on the larger questions (and draw inspiration from his pioneering analysis) and find the specifics of his interpretation unconvincing. By advancing this cluster of assertions – that ‘in the order of knowing or thinking, the correct “route” is a “steadfast,” controlled route “tied” or “committed” to its destination’; that the notion of being tied to a destination is expressed through the theme of the Fate-Constraint;Footnote 130 and that this confluence of imagery (the motif of the-journey, the theme of Fate-Constraint) ‘reaches toward the concept of logical or metaphysical necessity’ – Mourelatos surely identifies a phenomenon of major importance for the development of deductive argumentation and the history of Western thought. But at just the moment Mourelatos isolates the key element establishing the connection between the motif of the-journey and the theme of ‘Fate-Constraint’ – namely, the motif of ‘chariotry’, which threatens to turn the mosaic of imagery into an ‘eclectic’ phantasmagoria – he also fails to capture the precise way this motif actually does forge the link between the other two dominant figures.
It is at this stage that reintroducing insights gleaned from the discussion of the physical nature of archaic Greek roads above (Section 1.1) can move the discussion much further forward. It is, in fact, precisely by shifting the journeying from travel by ship to travel by wheeled vehicle that this web of connections not only becomes possible, but indeed obvious and conceptually potent. Once the physical nature of archaic Greek roads is properly taken into account and the semantic density of the word hodos (encompassing both an activity and an object) acknowledged, the relationship between journeying, chariotry, and the implacable strictures of Fate not only ceases to be eclectic, but their deep unity at the level of both word and image, their mutual dependence and mutually reinforcing qualities, becomes irresistible. It is precisely because (and only because) the motif of the journey has been expressed through the motif of chariotry, precisely because (and only because) the motif of journeying has been transferred from sea to land, from ship to wheeled vehicle, that it not only can be tied to the motif of the Fate-Constraint, of binding, of a ‘steadfast’ route ‘tied’ or ‘committed’ to its destination, but it does so as naturally as if a latter-day Parmenides had made his goddess speak of a ‘rail journey of inquiry’.
Depending on one’s interpretation of Parmenides’ arguments, the point has implications of a potentially major scale for our understanding of the hodos dizēsios. First, imag(in)ing the hodos dizēsios described by Parmenides’ goddess as a rut road inscribed into the earth underscores the degree to which this road pre-exists the travelling to be undertaken upon it. The world traversed by such a hodos has stable, fixed features that exist independently of, and prior to, a journey passing through it.Footnote 131 Such a road must have been constructed already in advance of the travel (and with the express agency of, and according to plans determined by, the constructor).Footnote 132 Such a route is, that is, prescribed: the tracks, so far as the traveller is concerned, are always already there.
But such a route is also prescribed. This point bears directly on ‘the notion of logical or metaphysical necessity’ that Mourelatos saw emerging from the theme of ‘Fate-Constraint’, and may also help us reconsider yet further the nature of Parmenides’ argumentation as analysed by Owen. The discussion above considered the relationship between the sēmata of Fragment 8 as posited by Owen, which is to say, in reverse order. Attaining the fourth sēma presupposed attainment of the third; this in turn presupposed attainment of the first, as did attainment of the second sēma; and this itself presupposed passage by way of the first hodos of Fragment 2 and fragments 6 and 7. Imagining the hodos dizēsios as a rut road inscribed into the terrain of inquiry it traverses, however, we find grounds for a stronger, more suggestive understanding of the relationship between journeying, travel by wheeled vehicle, and the notion of binding and constraints, one with even more direct bearing on the notion of metaphysical or logical necessity articulated in Parmenides’ poem. If the hodos described in Fragment 8 is seen as a rut road running continuously the length of the fragment (and, indeed, from Fragment 2 to 8 via fragments 6 and 7), this suggests that not only is each new point in the argument premised upon points previously established but also that, once one has arrived at a particular point on this hodos, one has no choice but to follow this prescribed track. Once one has been forced onto the first route in Fragment 2,Footnote 133 one has no choice but to arrive at the first sēma; and once one has arrived at the first sēma, if one continues the journey it is not only that one can reach the second sēma but that, locked into a predestined, preordained path, one must follow the track to the second point.Footnote 134 And this is true at every step of the way: having attained the second sēma, if one carries on with the journey one must arrive at the third, and from the third, the fourth. Returning to Mourelatos’s point concerning the metaphysical or logical necessity expressed through the notion of a ‘steadfast’ path that ‘ties’ one who travels upon it to a particular destination, we may see how deeply appropriate, not to mention effective and powerful, is the image of travelling by wheeled vehicle along a rut road. For what route could possibly be more ‘steadfast’, more ‘tied’ or ‘bound’ to its destination – and the rest of the itinerary it encompasses – than a rut road one travels by wheeled vehicle?
So far we have discussed the strictly sequential ordering of discursive units into a series in terms of the phrase ‘con-sequence’. In the Odyssey, units are connected in this manner partly on the basis of their spatial contiguity and partly on the basis of the temporal order in which they are reached in the course of travel, understood as a series of actions in time. In Parmenides’ fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8, we have seen that, on Owen’s reading, the four arguments that make up the hodos-units of Fragment 8’s ‘journey’ are also connected partly on the basis of a kind of underlying logical ‘contiguity’ rooted in the logical geography of Fragment 8’s ‘story-world’; similarly, their being ordered into a sequence stems in part from the journey through them, the hodos (journey-in-totality) dizēsios one travels across this terrain. But, if we take the motif of chariotry seriously and attend to the language of the proem (and especially its reference to a hamaxitos, Fr. 1.21), what we find is a hodos(-journey) whose hodos(-itinerary) moves along a hodos(-object = rut road): along a pre-scribed track whose course allows for no deviation, no wandering, nothing but ordered movement along a predetermined path, whose inscription into the terrain demands that once one has attained a particular point one must travel to the next in the sequence, and do so unerringly and necessarily. On Owen’s reading, what we see in the convergence of the motifs of journeying, chariotry, and the Fate-Constraint – three images compressed and condensed into, and encompassed by, this hodos dizēsios, a hodos(-journey) whose hodos(-itinerary) is connected by a hodos (rut road) – would thus be the transition from narrative con-sequence to logical consequence.
6.3.2 Other Implications: keleuthos
Appreciating the physical nature of archaic Greek roads and the semantic breadth and density of the word hodos also provides a potentially illuminating insight into another phenomenon identified by Mourelatos. In his analysis of the ‘Fate-Constraint’, he identified three ‘faces’ or ‘hypostases’: Anagke (Constraint), Moira (Fate), and Dike (Justice).Footnote 135 To these three, he adds a fourth: Peitho. In light of the semantics of the peith- word family in Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus and its role in parts of Parmenides’ poem, and alongside the words chrē and chreōn,Footnote 136 Mourelatos sees peith- terms expressing not the externally imposed force of the other three terms but rather an ‘inner-directed justice’, an ‘attitude of adherence or submission’, a ‘compliance or obedience’ that represents ‘an agreeable submission to the authority of Constraint-Fate-Justice’.Footnote 137
This interplay of internal and external forces, of obedience and agreeable adherence and compulsion and imposition, makes excellent sense at an ontological level. But yet again, Mourelatos has more difficulty substantiating his epistemologically oriented claims, such as: ‘[t]he four faces of the polymorph deity are aspects of the modality of necessity that controls what-is, and of the same modality as it applies to the route “___ is____”.’Footnote 138 In his analysis of the relationship between these ‘faces’ or ‘hypostases’, he discusses the ‘modality of chrē, “it is rightly necessary”’, that pilots the ‘route to reality’Footnote 139 and makes good use of his analysis of the peith- family while reminding us that the hodos of Fragment 8 was originally introduced with the phrase Πειθοῦς ἐστι κέλευθος (Fr. 2.4). Viewing this hodos(-itinerary) as moving along a hodos(-for-wheeled-vehicles) provides an elegant figuration of this interplay between internal adherence and external constraint at the epistemological level – in terms, that is, of the hodos dizēsios as ‘Route to Truth’. On the one hand, the grooves of the rut road provide an externally imposed force constraining the movement of the wheels of the chariot that journeys along it: it holds them fast in its bounds; on the other, the grooves of the rut road also provide free, agreeable movement to the chariot whose wheels ‘adhere to’ or ‘obey’ the prescribed track. The image of a journey by wheeled vehicle along a rut road expresses a forceful element of imposition, constraint, limitation, binding, while also articulating its own distinctive version of a journey of pistis and persuasion and ‘positive teleology’ (a felicitous phrase here).
Finally, analysis I have undertaken elsewhere and touch on in Chapter 1 can make a further contribution.Footnote 140 Recall that where the word hodos addressed a journey viewed as a single, unified whole (‘from the outside’) and in relation to its structure, the word keleuthos emphasized the process of journeying (viewed ‘from the inside’) and the series of actions and experiences that formed this process (Section 1.2). How fitting, then, that the process of travelling a hodos along a hodos, wheels locked into the track, should be referred to as a Πειθοῦς κέλευθος (Fr. 2.4): on Owen’s reading of the poem, to be swept along on this hodos is to undertake a κέλευθος, a journeying, that at every step of the way (or at every turn of the wheels) complies with, or adheres or submits to, the ‘positive teleology’ of the hodos-as-journey and the hodos-as-road.
6.3.3 Back on Track: Towards Conclusions
This, at any rate, is the view that a proponent of Owen’s reading of the poem’s argument would advance. But what would a proponent Sedley’s reading of Fragment 8 have to say? One should not forget that while Sedley sees Melissus’ arguments as forming ‘a single chain, with each predicate inferred directly from the previous one’, he reads each of Parmenides’ proofs as ‘largely independent’ and, with one exception, ‘self-contained, its premises either presented as self-evident or relying on one or both Laws’.Footnote 141
In fact, his reading also opens a surprising, even provocative, insight into the role played by the figure of the hodos in Parmenides’ poem. In the present discussion, two points should be borne in mind. First, Sedley still places great emphasis on the importance of argument (rather than mere assertion) to the development of Parmenides’ claims, of course.Footnote 142 Notably, in Sedley’s analysis of the specific argumentation advanced in Fragment 8, none of the four claims are proved independently of the ‘Two Laws’.Footnote 143
This is to say that, second, the net effect of Sedley’s analysis is to shift the bulk of the argumentative labour being done to the fragments preceding Fragment 8; if the claims of Fragment 8 are not built sequentially one upon the next, they depend even more heavily on fragments 2, 6, and 7. Law Two – ‘No proposition is true if it implies that, for any x, “x is not” is, was, or will be true’ – is, we might think, a crystallization of the principle expressed in Fr. 2.7–8 (and reiterated in 6.1–2).Footnote 144 For its part, Law One – ‘there are no half-truths. No proposition is both true and false. No question can be coherently answered “Yes and no”’ – is presented by Sedley as a paraphrase or gloss of 8.15–16, but he acknowledges that this is itself the product of the claims presented in Fr. 2.3–5 combined with those advanced in Fr. 6.4–9 (plus what has been understood as an implicit principle resembling the Law of Non-Contradiction).Footnote 145 In other words, Law Two is the product of the blockage of the second way (viz. the one articulated in Fr. 2.5), while Law One is the result of passing first by way of the first hodos presented in Fragment 2 (2.3–4) and then, possibly, via the further krisis expressed in fragment 6 and 7. The four qualities attributed to to eon come in con-sequence to (and/or are therefore the consequence of) the decisions at the various kris(e)is in fragments 2 and 6 and 7: once one travels by this way, it is inevitable that one arrive at the four conclusions represented by the four sēmata (even if the order in which one arrives at them is no longer very important).
On this view, the Two Laws become a pair of tracks, of preinscribed ruts, into which one finds oneself locked once one has passed through the krisis or successive kriseis of fragments 2 and 6 and 7. What does not (with the exception of the third sēma and its relationship to the first) have any inherent value is the precise order in which these conclusions are presented. Thus, intriguingly enough, if one accepts Sedley’s reading, it is the rhetorical power invested in the figure of the hodos qua ‘rhetorical schema’ that becomes most striking. By using this schema, with its special capacity to systematize discourse and provide description without descriptivity, narrativity without narration, as a means of figuring this sequence of otherwise (potentially) unordered units of argumentation, it is as if Parmenides allows the sequence itself to take on the reified mass of a tomb midden (sēma) installed in the earth, or an altar in the agora, or a stone stele implanted empedon in the ground. Sedley’s Parmenides would thus prove a virtuoso rhetorician, a master of imagery and polyvalent language. By marshalling the resources compressed and contained in the word and image of the hodos, Parmenides would invest the sequence of the claims advanced in Fragment 8 – which, provided they come after fragments 2, 6, and 7, might otherwise be listed in (almost) any order – with the appearance of the same necessity and pre-existing ordering, the same power and authority of the geography of the natural landscape, attached to an itinerary through physical space.Footnote 146
As noted above, my goal in discussing the competing interpretations of Fragment 8 offered by Owen and Sedley is not to advocate for the superiority of one or the other, but rather to explore two points. The first concerns the scope and applicability of the analysis above; what I hope to have shown is that the links I have constructed between Parmenides’ poem and its physical, linguistic, and poetic context are compatible with each of these two positions that define the mainstream spectrum of views on the proper ordering of the sēmata that form Fragment 8. The second builds on this by exploring more specifically what these links might mean, were one to endorse either Owen’s rigorously linear view of Fragment 8 or Sedley’s view that the sequence in which the sēmata are presented is not intrinsically related to the arguments supporting them.
6.3.4 Two Further Options
If the interpretations of Owen and Sedley define between them a range of widely accepted readings of Fragment 8, there are of course other interpretations that deviate from aspects of their shared orthodoxies. Although it would be excessive to conduct an exhaustive survey of how each of these other approaches might be reconciled with my account of Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation, briefly addressing two recent, exemplary interpretations of Parmenides’ Fragment 8 is still a valuable exercise; doing so will help illuminate more precisely the nature and scope of this book’s contributions to the study of Parmenides’ poem and our understanding of the history of archaic – and Western – thought more broadly.
The first is the distinctive line of interpretation of Parmenides’ poem pioneered by Scott Austin.Footnote 147 One of Austin’s most valuable contributions is to delineate a pattern of assertions, negations, positions, and privations whose recombinations underlie – and perhaps even serve as a generating principle behind – Parmenides’ arguments.Footnote 148 An attractive consequence of approaching Parmenides’ arguments via this aspect of their formal construction is the original perspective it opens onto their content. More specifically, Austin’s interest in the triadic pattern of position, negation, and recapitulatory double negation and his observations regarding the creation of dyadic pairings and triadic groupings in Fragment 8Footnote 149 reveal a subtly different way of grouping together the content addressed by the fragment’s four sēmata. On Austin’s view, the arguments in lines 8.6–15 address what-is in terms of time, lines 8.22–31 address being in terms of space or ‘the occupation of place by mass’,Footnote 150 and then in lines 8.32 and 8.42–49 ‘the conclusions developed during the considerations of time and of mass/place are recapitulated, combined, and rolled up into a complete statement’.Footnote 151
What most catches the eye in the current setting is the extent to which, seen through the lens of Austin’s interpretation, Parmenides’ arguments advance in a fundamentally sequential, progressive manner. On Austin’s reading, Parmenides’ argumentation is defined by a necessary and inherent directionality; as a consequence, it is hard to imagine a scenario consistent with Austin’s view in which Parmenides could just as easily have swapped the sēmata around or advanced them in a different order had he so desired.Footnote 152 As Austin points out, the successive interplay of dyads, triads, and singlets, assertions and negations, positions and privations elaborates ‘the story of a gradual movement away from contrariety and towards unity … The logic and rhetoric of the “Truth-Section” are cumulative’.Footnote 153
There are many significant points of non-overlap between Austin’s interests and orientation and those of the account of Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation provided here. Austin is little concerned with Parmenides’ poetic background, his pervasive use of road imagery, the dramatic setting in which the staging of the enumeration of the routes is embedded, and other ‘poetic’ aspects of Parmenides’ poem; likewise, his extensive discussion of such things as negative predication, modal operators, and Platonic, Trinitarian, or Hegelian dialectics might seem to have little in common with the present book’s concerns. This only makes it all the more striking, however, that Austin’s analysis seems not only highly compatible, but indeed to align in neat congruence, with the analysis I have undertaken above. That the discursive architecture undergirding the hodos narrated by Circe to Odysseus should provide the larger organizing framework within which Parmenides could explore, in a manner both systematic and argumentatively rigorous, the complete array of possible combinations of assertion and negation, position and privation is not only plausible, but highly attractive. To put the matter the other way round: if what Austin’s account reveals is a pattern of arguments formed from different combinations of privation and negation, position and assertion, the question remains as to how these different phases or stages in the argument are to be joined together: how to imag(in)e the relationship between them? But this is precisely what the rhetorical schema of the hodos and its associated types of dependence provides: a discursive framework to be filled in according to the pattern described by Austin. On this view, the two formal perspectives of Parmenides’ construction of his argument – Austin’s and the one offered here – would not only complement each other but, by triangulating key principles underlying their construction, could also provide an important and potentially guiding insight into what Parmenides’ arguments mean.
Perhaps rather more difficult to reconcile with the historical account I have offered is the line of interpretation recently developed by Richard McKirahan.Footnote 154 McKirahan’s presentation has its share of important virtues. Re-emphasizing that Parmenides ‘lived before canons of deductive inference had been formalized’, he sagely observes that ‘the interpreter’s job is not to aim for formal validity, but to attempt a reconstruction of Parmenides’ train of thought, showing how he might have supposed that the conclusion follows from the premises he gives’.Footnote 155 While just what it means for a conclusion to ‘follow’ a premise (i.e. how we ought best attempt to ‘reconstruct’ Parmenides’ ‘train of thought’ – or, better, hodos dizēsios) gets to the very heart of what is at stake here, on these points, at least, I find myself in fervent agreement with McKirahan – even as our different approaches, and answers, to this question get to the heart of our disagreement.
At this juncture, however, we part ways. Or nearly at this juncture, for, as with other interpreters, McKirahan also takes the lines following 8.2 to constitute a programme (he opts to include 8.5–6)Footnote 156 of points, or clusters of points, that Parmenides will set out to prove. McKirahan’s list differs from Owen’s, Sedley’s, and those of other interpreters in several respects, however. First, McKirahan distinguishes six groups, rather than the usual four sēmata (he styles these ‘Groups A-F’). Second, McKirahan’s groups do not strictly track the sequence in which the sēmata are presented from line 8.3; the items that form the programme are clustered instead according to another organizing principle.Footnote 157 Thus, third, McKirahan’s groups cut across the ordinary division of the programme, in some cases resulting in the pairing of qualities that are usually taken as distinct, while in others splitting up familiar pairings. So Group B, for example, is formed by ‘whole’ (οὖλον, 8.4), ‘complete’ (τέλειον, 8.4), ‘all together’ (ὁμοῦ πᾶν, 8.5; συνεχές, 8.6), thereby collecting under one heading attributes deemed by Owen, Sedley, and most other interpreters to correspond to the second and fourth sēmata in the programme (oulon and teleion/teleston, respectively).Footnote 158 On the other hand, mounogenes (8.4), ordinarily read with the grain of the syntax of line 4 as being paired with oulon (and thus one half of the signpost for ou diaireton, viz. sēma 2, lines 8.22–25), is here glossed as ‘unique’ and paired with ‘one’ (ἕν, 8.6), which together form their own distinct cluster, Group F.
Since McKirahan’s approach is geared towards his understanding of the content of the arguments he finds rather than the sequence of their presentation, this ultimately yields a sequence of Categories that does not track the movement of Fragment 8.6–49 any more than it does lines 8.3–6, another major difference between McKirahan’s reading and most others. So, for example, the treatment of members in Category D: ‘changeless, motionless’ are to be found scattered throughout various parts of the poem, including lines 8.26, 38, 41, ‘and possibly 8.29–30’.Footnote 159 Finally, another result of McKirahan’s approach is that certain qualities identified in the programme – Group F: ‘unique’ (μουνογενές) and ‘one’ (ἕν) – remain entirely unaddressed in the remainder of Fragment 8,Footnote 160 while other portions of the body of Fragment 8, namely lines 42–49, lack any identifiable correlate in the programme.Footnote 161
It is worth emphasizing one final time that this is not the place to assess the merits of specific interpretations of Parmenides’ arguments. Rather, the more pertinent question here would be how a defender of McKirahan’s view, which expressly – and rightly – underscores the need to remain alert to the risks of anachronism and to understand Parmenides’ poem and its arguments in their historical context, would reconcile his or her approach and the results it yields with the historical question of how Parmenides developed his radically new way of speaking and arguing. If the resources offered by the semantics of the word hodos, the real objects to which it referred, and the intertextual dramatic and discursive frameworks it conjures up do indeed play a crucial role in mediating the transition from Homeric narrative to Parmenidean argumentation, what does this mean for interpretations of Fragment 8 that do not see these arguments as formed from a series of distinct segments or phases of the itinerary of the hodos dizēsios, or the programme announcing a catalogue of these phases point by point as they will be asserted and argued for? Conversely, were we to accept an interpretation which did not respect this linear, sequential, cumulative structure,Footnote 162 would this imply that an account of Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation different from the one offered here might be required?
6.4 Sēma IV: Accomplishments and Completions
It is time to bring this pistos logos to a close. The arrangement of words in Chapter 7 (‘Mortal Opinions’), potentially deceptive in its own way, will offer an invitation to reflect on how our own criteria of knowledge, what we count as a valid contribution to it, and the hodos dizēsios of academic research that leads us there, all retain a fundamentally Parmenidean shape – for better and for worse. If part of this shape is defined by what Karl Popper has called the ‘Parmenidean apology’ of the Doxa and the questions it poses about the status of the ‘Route to Truth’, Part III (Doxai) will explore what this implies for the analysis undertaken in this and preceding the three chapters of Part II (Routes). By testing the limits of reading Parmenides alongside Homer, I hope to call attention to some of our own epistemic presuppositions, which are not always fully articulated or acknowledged, and to underscore their relationship to a Parmenidean, and Homeric, desire for certainty and closure – and to the difficulty of attaining it.
For now, however, it remains to ask what all this – this chapter, this Part (Routes), and the primary line of argument in this book – amounts to.Footnote 163 The answer to this question will depend quite considerably on the fields, methods, and aims of the scholar who happens to be reading this book; the analysis undertaken above will likely be valuable for different reasons to, and be used in different ways by, scholars working in different fields, or attempting to answer different questions. One way of organizing the range of possible implications of this book’s claims for our understanding of Parmenides’ arguments would be to discuss matters in terms of ‘priority’.
Working on one level, for example, will be scholars whose main approach to philosophical texts begins with an attempt to understand and reconstruct the argumentative moves of a text in relation to what might make a ‘good’ argument by our own standards, regardless of whether these are expressed in ancient Greek, English, or any other language (perhaps including logical notation).Footnote 164 In this case, what might be called philosophical analysis of Parmenides’ argumentation will likely remain ‘prior to’ the aspects of Parmenides’ poem discussed here. That is, one expects that such a scholar will likely decide first whether he or she finds, say, Owen’s or Sedley’s assessment of the poem’s argumentation persuasive; then, having settled on one or the other, he or she can use the analysis presented here to explore aspects of his or her preferred interpretation in this new light. The questions that will exercise such a scholar will likely concern determining to what extent, and in which distinctive ways, Parmenides was influenced by the pattern of Circe’s description of the hodos, or up to what point he relies on, and at what point he moves beyond, the physical features of Greek rut roads in developing his own arguments.Footnote 165 Did Parmenides conjure consequence from con-sequence, as a disciple of Owen might feel, as he travelled a hodos along a rut road of argument inscribed into a pre-existing logical terrain? Or was Parmenides a master rhetorician, deploying a discursive architecture with a capacity for a temporally unimpregnated systematicity and argumentativeness, narrativity without narration and description without descriptivity, as a Sedleian interpreter might have it? Or, rather, are the language and imagery used by Parmenides entirely irrelevant, and his arguments fitted together according to some other set of principles entirely – and, if so, what are those?
Working on another level, scholars more focused on Parmenides’ place in the history of thought might approach his poem with a different set of presuppositions and commitments, especially as far as the relationship between language and the ideas it expresses, between signifier and signified, are concerned. Particularly if they are interested in Parmenides’ role as the decisive figure mediating the transition to a conception of knowledge predicated on extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration,Footnote 166 the semantics of the word hodos, the imagistic force of the rut road, and, especially, the discursive architecture provided by the hodos (and Circe’s hodos in Odyssey 12 in particular) may well maintain some degree of priority in their interpretation of Parmenides’ arguments; this last component would provide the matrix of discursive possibility available to Parmenides within which to undertake his metaphysical or cosmological endeavours.Footnote 167 For their part, literary critics of the sort who study Pindar, perhaps, or even Homer – with perhaps still other commitments concerning the relationship between words and ideas – might go so far as to advance a form of the stronger claim that in some respects it is Parmenides’ road imagery that plays an active role in driving his discursive structure, just as one might uncontroversially claim the same for either poet.Footnote 168
Finally, working on yet another level, other scholars of ancient poetry might ‘give priority’ neither to the content of Parmenides’ arguments nor to the role played by his imagery in shaping their form; rather, they might be more interested in the analysis undertaken above as a case study in reception theory, one that departs from the usual strategy of dissecting repeated phrases, or type scenes, or cleverly pointed allusions, and moves towards an approach oriented towards archaeological explorations of discourse. Or, similarly, they might perhaps find the above study more useful as another data point to be woven into a larger story about the diverse modes of engaging with, and reworking, Homer that blossomed in the late archaic era.Footnote 169 How best to incorporate the analysis undertaken here into one’s understanding of Parmenides’ poem is a choice that each scholar will make depending on his or her own orientations and methods, philosophical commitments, and aims and objectives.
It is also possible, however, that in the final analysis even the dichotomy between the philosophically minded and the history of thought- or poetry-minded analysts of Parmenides will not fully withstand deeper scrutiny. What should a member of the first group who finds McKirahan’s reading of Fragment 8 compelling say to a historian of thought who defends the reading I have advanced here? Surely some account of Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation and outline of demonstration is required; barring this, we find ourselves back in the Greek Miracle paradigm. And what should future interpreters who attempt to forge their own path, finding satisfactory none of the interpretations of Parmenides’ arguments currently on offer, think of all this? Most crucially: to what factor or set of factors should they give priority as they do so?
This final nexus of questions takes on extra significance in light of the positive reception that McKirahan’s analysis has received.Footnote 170 I noted above McKirahan’s injunction that our interpretations of Parmenides’ arguments should not be imprisoned by an anachronistic understanding of what makes Parmenides’ arguments ‘good’. Like McKirahan, I, too, wholly subscribe to the notion that one consequence of this is that ‘the interpreter’s job is not to aim for formal validity, but to attempt a reconstruction of Parmenides’ train of thought, showing how he might have supposed that the conclusion follows from the premises he gives’. But needing to remain alert to the risks of binding our interpretation of Parmenides’ arguments within the straightjacket of subsequent canons of argumentation does not imply free licence to interpret them without any consideration for the imagery or discursive architecture in which he chose to express himself. Put differently, that the rules governing their order and structure are not those of Aristotelian or Fregan logic does not mean that we can ignore larger questions concerning the ordering, patterning, and overall structure of Parmenides’ arguments in toto. As McKirahan’s own phrase suggests, just what it means for a conclusion to ‘follow’ from a premise is precisely what is at stake in our different understandings of Parmenides’ poem. That the sense of many words and phrases crucial to Parmenides’ arguments in Fragment 8 (such as eon … eonti pelazei at line 25, for example, or akinēton at line 26) remain obscure and hotly contested is widely acknowledged. And if we peer through so dark a glass at the meaning of so much of Parmenides’ language, one might ask just how comfortable we should be in giving priority to our speculations about the ‘content’ of this language – especially when considering what it meant to Parmenides for a ‘conclusion to follow from a premise’, or how best to reconstruct his ‘train of thought’.
By contrast, what I hope to have shown here is that we have a much better foundation upon which ‘to attempt a reconstruction of Parmenides’ train of thought’ – or, rather, as he himself called it, his hodos dizēsios. This is, of course, to study the nature of the hodos part of the hodos dizēsios. Why might Parmenides have used this term? What resources did it offer him? How might it have exerted its own influenced him in turn? These are the questions I hoped to have answered, or to have begun answering, in this book.
I opened this study by discussing the heavy price scholars have paid for anachronistically treating Parmenides’ poem as if it were nothing more nor less than a sequence of extended deductive arguments as we understand that term.Footnote 171 Doing so not only cast aspects of Parmenides’ argumentation in an unjustly unflattering light, but also obscured the seminal role he played in forging from the discursive forms he inherited a new and powerful way of speaking persuasively – one that shares decisive features with what Aristotle would later call apodeixis or demonstration (and, indeed, defines and establishes them). But detaching Parmenides from the story of what came after him for (well-intentioned) fear of anachronism is arguably no less dangerous, no less distorting – and no less anachronistic. Demonstration does have a direct progenitor and distinguished pedigree in the road-thought and road-speech that Parmenides explicitly invokes. And, much more to the point, as I have tried to establish in this book, Parmenides’ road-thought and road-speech is in turn integrally related to the road-thought and road-speech of his predecessors, specifically Homer, especially what we find in Odyssey 12.37–141. It is precisely this inherited discursive infrastructure that Parmenides reuses and reworks to craft his own radical new way of thinking and speaking persuasively – and thus precisely what can offer us such a promising basis upon which to reconstruct his ‘train of thought’ and grapple with what it might mean to him for ‘a conclusion to follow from a premise’ in the movement of his hodos dizēsios.
It is, however, just this road-thought and road-speech, so definitive for the shape and texture of the design of the ‘Route to Truth’, that McKirahan must jettison to get his interpretation of its arguments to stick. One could say – no doubt somewhat idiosyncratically – that it is as if for McKirahan, Parmenides’ arguments are a kind of jigsaw puzzle-baby that must be rescued from the bathwater of their argumentation in order to be assembled properly outside it; by contrast, I would contend that Parmenides’ argument-baby has in fact been developed exactly to fit the bath.Footnote 172 It does not follow from this, incidentally, that the philosopher’s, or historian of philosophy’s, concerns must be rigorously secondary to those of the historian of thought or the literary critic. Rather, adequate attention to the structure of Parmenides’ argumentation (thanks to the efforts of the latter) can be an invaluable guide in helping the former grapple with his or her quandaries. Likewise, insights divined by the former can help the latter to refine and improve his or her analysis – which can in turn help guide further study by the philosophers, and so on. By considering questions of form and content as deeply – inextricably – interrelated, we can better understand the shape of this bath and the nature of the philosophy-child that it holds, which is both the scion of Homer’s line and the founding dynast of Western philosophical and scientific thinking.
Taking several steps back, we may also observe that trying to square the historical account offered here with the interpretive accounts offered by Owen, Sedley, Austin, and especially McKirahan is a valuable exercise in its own right. This enterprise highlights just how complex is the web of hermeneutic assumptions and interpretative priorities that any reader of Parmenides’ poem brings to bear on his or her reading. When it comes to the Presocratics, to whom we are so indebted for the modes of thought with which we investigate themFootnote 173 and yet whom we still so little understand, the truism that what we get out of the hermeneutic circle depends on where we enter it is even more vertiginously true than usual. Are we invested in locating Parmenides in his physical time and linguistic context, or was his brilliance such that this is unimportant, that whatever the nature of his intellectual or discursive milieu might have been, he would not have been constrained – or perhaps even influenced – by it? If we do want to discuss language and imagery, is this to be done in relation to the Homer (or Hesiod) of Parmenides’ past, say, or to the Plato (or Democritus, or Empedocles) standing in his future, or to Orphic or other religious – or legal, or what have you – language that may have been current in the Elea of his present? If we want to gain purchase on just what, precisely, Parmenides was arguing for, how much should we emphasize those against whom he might have been arguing (and should that be an Ionian cosmologist, or Heraclitus, or members of a competing mystery cult or religious sect, or some other under explored or still-unexplored possibility?), the specific language of the arguments themselves, their form, the way that Parmenides’ different successors understood them – or the degree to which any of these factors might still have a bearing on our own contemporary issues, in philosophy or elsewhere? How important is it that Parmenides be understood to argue as we do today? If it is important, how powerful is our commitment to the soundness or validity of Parmenides’ arguments? How much do we feel the need to ‘salvage’ them if we wish to preserve Parmenides’ standing among the giants in the history of thought?
These are important questions, each of which can be answered in a number of legitimate ways – and in each case we are likely to see a subtly or profoundly different Parmenides emerge. Ultimately, of course, how we answer will likely tell us more about our own theories of language, of the history of conceptual change, and of the process by which new modes of thought emerge than about Parmenides himself. For my part, I would urge that we spend at least some time viewing Parmenides as we would any other archaic Greek poet, taking care to historicize his use of language, its sense and reference; to re-embed him not only within his intellectual tradition, but also, especially, his poetic tradition; and to attend to the manner in which the form, imagery, and content of his poem are interrelated. Even for those interpreters who insist on giving hermeneutic priority strictly to content independent of form (on the premise that the one could be strictly independent of the other), these considerations must remain a powerful criterion in assessing the strength, persuasiveness, and credibility of philosophically oriented interpretations of Parmenides’ arguments. Ideally, however, the historical question of how Parmenides came to argue as he did will become a top-tier consideration in its own right, assuming a well-earned place alongside questions such as against whom, or in favour of what, he might have been arguing. It should ascend, that is, to the status of a premier consideration orienting our hermeneutic stance to Parmenides’ poem, and especially the arguments he advances in the ‘Route to Truth’.
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