What is a hodos? The urgency of the question will be obvious to any reader of Parmenides’ Greek. We have already noted the degree to which the word and image are woven into the very heart of the poem’s fabric, however much that fact may have been deplored by the purists who guard the gates to Logos’ wing of the academy. Similarly, we have already observed the ways in which the traditional impulse to read the ‘Route to Truth’ portion of Parmenides’ poem (frs. 2–8) as a deductive argument – no more and no less – have at best ignored this question, and at worst precluded its being investigated further, rendering it panapeuthēs; if Parmenides is already making a deductive argument, and if he is only making a deductive argument, who would think to ask what a hodos is – and why, anyway, would it matter? How could the chance, contingent facts of archaic Greek means of travel by land and technical questions of road construction have any bearing on a timeless argument concerning the timeless questions of the nature of what is?
We may recall once more Lloyd’s observation that ‘the terminology in which [Parmenides] describes what he is doing is a very limited one’.Footnote 1 Viewed from the perspective of the mature, well-developed technical vocabulary with which Aristotle or the Stoics, for example, can undertake not only various kinds of proofs and demonstrations, but also second-order reflections on these topics, this is undoubtedly true. All Parmenides has at his disposal are the resources of ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ objects and the power and resonance of epic poetry and myth. And yet, for precisely the same reason, Parmenides has at his disposal all the resources of ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ objects and the power and resonance of epic poetry and myth.Footnote 2 In this chapter, then, I shall take a closer look at just what this material was that Parmenides had to work with; in the first part (Section 1.1), I shall examine the physical nature and social function of archaic and classical Greek roads as realia, while in the second (Section 1.2), I shall examine the semantics of the Homeric vocabulary of roads and journeying, especially the word hodos, relevant to Parmenides’ poem.Footnote 3
1.1 Archaic and Classical Greek Roads
So what, then, is a hodos? Fortunately, we are better able to answer the question now than we were during most of the twentieth century. Although some of the key facts about archaic and classical Greek roads have long been known, the current view has only recently come into focus thanks to light shed by the last few decades of scholarship on the physical nature of the Greek polis. That roads are on the scholarly agenda at all is in itself a minor revolution; for the better part of the twentieth century the topic was largely neglected, attracting the odd monograph, an article here or there in the archaeological bulletins, and the occasional insinuation into chapters devoted to other topics.Footnote 4 Until recently, the conventional wisdom regarding roads in archaic and classical Greece could be summarized as follows. To begin with, there weren’t many. Those that did exist were generally rudimentary and rather crudely constructed. The emergence of a well-developed system of roads was thought to depend on the existence of an empire or other central authority rich enough to be able to build a highway network, centralized enough to plan it, and oppressive enough to need one in order to administer (and, if necessary, subdue) far-flung, subordinate provinces. Seen this way, road networks seemed incompatible with the fierce independence that defined that patchwork mosaic of Greek poleis before Alexander. The Persians, who impressed Herodotus with top-notch roads (in the time of Xerxes, a messenger could cover the 2,600 km from Sardis to Susa in nine days, a rate unmatched until the Napoleonic era)Footnote 5 were ruled, of course, by a tyrant king who could afford to build them – and who needed to. Further road building was left for the Romans. Hence Greek road building’s relative neglect, historically speaking, as a meritorious subject of inquiry.Footnote 6
The combination of new archaeological evidence and the emergence of a new way of conceptualizing both the evolution of the polis and what a polis is have, however, slowly chipped away at the foundations of that traditional construction and helped produce a new one.Footnote 7
First, the polis. François de Polignac’s La naissance de la cité grecque (1984) has been variously critiqued, developed, and nuanced,Footnote 8 but its enduring legacy is a conceptualization of the evolution of the polis (and, indeed, of theorizing what it means to be a polis) that links that evolution to the relationship between urban nucleus or nuclei and places of religious, economic, or strategic significance in the surrounding environment.Footnote 9 In de Polignac’s own words, ‘it is impossible to separate the evolution of urban centres from the overall process of organization of territory’.Footnote 10 And it is impossible in turn to consider the relationship between urban centre and territory (and, a fortiori, the organization of a territory) without according a primordially important role to the road. This has sometimes been acknowledged (though too rarely explored at length), as when de Polignac discusses the importance of the sacred ways linking an urban nucleus or nuclei to extra-urban sanctuaries.Footnote 11 At the most mundane, and certainly the most obvious, level, without some means of physical communication facilitating movement from town to extra-urban sanctuary, the great processions that have been recognized as vital for the formation and consolidation of a single social unit would not have been possible – for how else could the necessary carts, elaborate processions, and cult paraphernalia make it the many kilometres from town to sanctuary or sanctuary to town?Footnote 12 No less significant were the social, political, and economic consequences of road building that linked urban centres (or sanctuaries) to marble quarries or mines, for example, or to a port, or to sites of cultic importance, or, indeed, to other poleis and trading partners.Footnote 13
It is also true that the increasing significance of roads in this emergence of the polis might be extended along many other axes. Following scholars who have compared the construction of roads from pre-existing paths or tracks to the relationship between writing and speech,Footnote 14 or have discussed the evolution of the ‘visual semiotics’ of the polis, it is important to stress the conceptual effect of the fixed, manifest, and highly visible form of expressing and articulating the linkages between an urban nucleus and sites of importance in its territory.Footnote 15 One example of special importance concerns the decisive role played by roads in defining the domains developed in new colonies and demarcating the framework – here understood in a peculiarly literal sense – according to which land could be differentiated into public and private or partitioned into klēroi for allocation to new citizen-settlers.Footnote 16 Or again, how, once fixed, these roads became public sites around which cemeteries and monumental grave markers sprang up to advertise the wealth and status of the local aristocracy and prominent families.Footnote 17 What would emerge in all of these cases is the manner in which roads play a decisive role in the organization, systematization, regularization, and ritualization of space – topics linked to Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ by the central role played by roads in the ordering of space, be it physical, mental, or discursive.
1.1.1 Physical Nature and Construction
This is not, however, the place to undertake these sprawling examinations concerning the manner in which roads order space and organize territories; what is most relevant here is the physical nature of these roads, something never previously considered in relation to the use of the figure of the road in the poetry of Homer, for example, or Pindar, or, most pertinently, Parmenides.Footnote 18 For what is meant by ‘road’ in all the settings adduced above are not the myriad mule paths and beaten tracks that criss-crossed the countryside.Footnote 19 Nor are we discussing, as often seems to be assumed, the roads, constructed from mortar, concrete, stone slabs, and cement, that would later serve as one of Rome’s most celebrated exports and cultural signifiers. Rather, the stony Greek terrain (and, perhaps, the slightly more modest finances of the individual polis) demanded another method of road construction. This is what has often been called the ‘rut road’, ‘track road’, or, in Mure’s enduring phrase, the ‘stone railway’:Footnote 20 a pair of grooves engraved into the rocky Greek terrain. Ultimately, we shall see that giving proper consideration to the physical nature of archaic Greek roads will open up a new horizon onto Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ and its skilful exploitation of language and imagery in the service of fashioning a new notion of discursive arrangement, one that involves a prescribed movement along a path (or, as we would call it, logical necessity; see Chapter 6 below).
If Mure was right to insist that these ruts were not merely the product of repeated use but were intentionally constructed, how were these rut roads constructed?Footnote 21 Particularly jagged sections of terrain might call for the levelling of the road’s surface;Footnote 22 more often, however, the surface of the road was left alone, and the set of grooves is the only sign of the road builders’ presence.Footnote 23 Ruts could be cut to a depth of anywhere from 1 to 30 cm.Footnote 24 We know less than we might about the technical detail of this construction; perhaps our best evidence comes from an inexplicably neglected passage in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia where Persian ‘superintendents of the road builders’ (οἱ τῶν ὁδοποιῶν ἄρχοντες) are told that soldiers deemed unfit for service with the spear, bow, or slingshot must carry the wood-cutting axe (πέλεκυς ξυλοκόπος), the mattock or pickaxe (σμινύη), and the shovel (ἄμη), respectively, ‘in case there should be need of any road building’ (ὅπως ἤν τι δέῃ ὁδοποιίας, Xen. Cyr. 6.2.36). Whichever specific instruments may have been employed, the road ruts were carefully squared and polished.Footnote 25 As the enduring presence today of some ancient ruts attests, this method of road construction produced a result that was unusually resistant to daily wear and tear and weather damage in comparison to other road-building techniques. Evidence suggests that roadbeds could also be constructed across portions of the route that did not traverse rocky terrain, and that these, too, were rutted; the road track, that is to say, was probably entirely continuous from origin to destination. These roadbeds were confected of gravel or pot sherds mixed with earth.Footnote 26
Casson and others have claimed that cart roads had a ‘more or less standard gauge’ across the board, but there was evidently at least a certain degree of variation. At the Athenian Dipylon Gate and along the Sacred Way the median average gauge is 1.45 m, for example, while a rutted road 23 km north of Sparta has a gauge of 1.35 m, and even narrower tracks with gauges of 1.23 m and 1.25 m have been recorded near Mycenae and Cardamyle, respectively; on the other end of the spectrum, Despotopoulos reported gauges of 1.55–1.60 m on roads in the Argolid and between Orchomenus and Larymna.Footnote 27 Even among the roads in Laurium one finds gauge differentials of up to 6 cm. Likewise, the width of the ruts themselves varied from 6 cm to 14.5 cm. Nevertheless, it seems likely in most cases that any given cart would have been able to negotiate nearly all the roads just mentioned.Footnote 28
Greek roads were certainly more at the mercy of topography than their Roman successors, and, as a result, often meandered through relatively level valley terrain regardless of the extra distance such a course might entail (footpaths and beaten tracks offered more direct but less level routes that were generally not suitable for wheeled vehicles).Footnote 29 This is not to say, however, that Greek engineers lacked the know-how to undertake more ambitious engineering projects when they saw fit: in the area around Laurium alone, Young catalogues many instances of what he terms the ‘terraced road’, the ‘cut-and-terraced road’, the ‘dam road’, and the ‘dyke road’.Footnote 30 One may also note the use of so-called ‘groove roads’ over portions of especially smooth rock; here, bands of shallow grooves (like those on the ascent to the Athenian Acropolis) were chiselled out at an angle transverse to the cart’s path in order to afford purchase on the slick surface.Footnote 31 Recent studies have also observed more daring instances of engineering, including the construction of roads on slopes exceeding a 10–15 per cent gradient, or at very high altitude (e.g. over the north crest of Taygetus, at 1,600 m).Footnote 32
The now-ubiquitous comparison of the ‘rut road’ to a kind of stone railway (or, as a more recent scholar puts it, a ‘negative railway’),Footnote 33 a comparison that Mure had made as far back as 1842, is especially worth commenting on here. Once a vehicle’s wheels were ‘in the groove’, as it were, its route and its destination were locked in no less than its wheels (see frontispiece). This proved especially problematic when two carts confronted each other on the open road, for the vast majority of roads seem to have been single-tracked for the better part of their course (though a handful of the busiest roads, notably between Athens and Delphi and Sparta and Olympia, were in some places given double tracks).Footnote 34 The extent of the challenge this presented to ancient travellers is difficult for the modern user of roads to fathom fully. One strategy for coping with such challenges was to construct a series of (often infrequent) lay-bys or turn-offs, which allowed two vehicles to pass each other;Footnote 35 if a pair of carts travelling in opposite directions encountered each other, the two options were thus for one to retreat to the nearest lay-by or, if there were none in the area, to physically remove the vehicle and its wheels from the track, which must have been a heavy task indeed. The situation in mountainous areas has seemed so hazardous as to prompt one scholar to speculate on the necessity of watchmen to oversee traffic at key points of important routes; at the very least, a set of protocols governing right of way would seem to have been needed in such situations, even if it is lost to us now.Footnote 36 (At this point in the discussion it is considered de rigueur to craft a joke about Oedipus, Laius, and the first recorded case of road rage in antiquity.) Of course, this position of being locked into a fixed course could also be beneficial if, say, one needed to execute a turn while descending a steep slope surrounded by cliffs (a scenario with which any driver or bus passenger on the modern Greek road is terrifyingly familiar); here the ruts act as a kind of ‘guard rail’. This situation is worth bearing in mind when considering the labour (and wide arc) required to turn a cart whose wheels are higher than its frame.Footnote 37 Again, this fundamental aspect of travelling via rut road will be important in our discussion of Parmenides below, particularly in relation to his invention of the notion of logical necessity (see Chapter 6).
1.1.2 Social Context
What little we do know about the administration and supervision of ancient Greek roads comes from the classical period and does not shed much light on how such affairs were managed in the archaic period.Footnote 38 Some scholars imagine construction and repair to have been a liturgy, others that it was a quasi-imperial endeavour of ‘a powerful central authority’, and others still that hoplite armies served as road crews.Footnote 39 Hard evidence is in short supply.Footnote 40 Intra muros, it seems that in the classical period the astynomoi (and later the agoranomoi) were tasked with keeping streets clean, while the hodopoioi, of which there were five at Athens, according to [Aristotle] (Ath. Pol. 54.1), were to look after their repair with the assistance of public slaves;Footnote 41 the regular appointment of these officials may well have been a fourth-century development, however.Footnote 42 Plato’s Laws contains a lengthy passage on the responsibilities of the so-called agronomoi, one of which was to oversee sixty young men from each tribe tasked with beautifying the countryside, conserving its waters, and attending to the roads (760a–761a); it is doubted whether this position ever actually existed in Athens.Footnote 43 Nor do inscriptions always provide unequivocal answers. A pair of inscriptions regarding bridges on the road to Eleusis, for example, tell different stories: the older, from 421/20 BCE, provides for the construction of a stone bridge at public expense by decree of the Athenian ekklēsia (IG I2 81), while a decree by the deme of Eleusis (IG II2 1191) exactly 100 years later honours one Xenocles for constructing a stone bridge at his own expense.Footnote 44 An Athenian copy of an Amphictyonic Law of 380/79 BCE arrogates to the Amphictyones responsibility for repair of roads and bridges, presumably those leading to Delphi and Pyloi (IG II2 1126.40–43).Footnote 45 Herodotus tells us that in Sparta, judgement concerning the public roads was the prerogative of the kings alone (6.57.4).Footnote 46
In Herodotus’ description of the events leading up to the denouement of the Persian campaign against the Scythians, we find a sentence that begins as follows (4.136):
ἅτε δὲ τοῦ Περσικοῦ μὲν τοῦ πολλοῦ ἐόντος πεζοῦ στρατοῦ καὶτὰς ὁδοὺς οὐκ ἐπισταμένου, ὥστε οὐ τετμημενέων τῶν ὁδῶν.
But seeing that the Persian army was for the most part footmen and did not know the hodoi, since they had not been tetmēmenai.
Many translations here render ὥστε οὐ τετμημενέων τῶν ὁδῶν ‘since the roads had not been marked’.Footnote 47 Other scholars, however, take the word τέμνειν much more literally: ‘just as in the English language roads are “constructed,” in Greek they were “cut” (temnein)’.Footnote 48 Construing τέμνειν as ‘to cut’ rather than simply ‘to mark’ draws support from a passage in Thucydides (2.100), who notes, for example, that it was King Archelaus who was responsible for most of the fortresses and roads to be found in Macedonia in Thucydides’ day, for it was he who ‘cut the highways/major roads’ (ὁδοὺς εὐθείας ἔτεμε) in the region.Footnote 49
The passage from Herodotus raises the question of the nature and extent of road signs, signposts, or road markers of other kinds in archaic and classical Greece. Historically, the consensus was that such things had come only with the Romans and their road-building expertise.Footnote 50 Archaeological finds from Attica suggest otherwise, however. An inscription on the Altar of the Twelve Gods in the heart of the Athenian agora reads (IG II2 2640):
The inscription itself is dated to the end of the fifth century, but the original altar is thought to have been built in 522/21 by Peisistratus (grandson of the tyrant) and perhaps renovated around 425 BCE.Footnote 52 Whether or not this altar was conceived of as the epicentre of the Athenian polis, the basis or focal point anchoring a larger system of measurement, from the moment of its installation is not certain; what seems clear, however, is that by Herodotus’ day at the latest, it occupied precisely this role.Footnote 53 Moreover, no critic of Parmenides’ poem could fail to be struck by two features of this extraordinary object: first, that the marker declares itself to record and convey some kind of truth – it has been erected as a mnēmeion alēthes; and second, that this record is truthful insofar as it accurately ‘signs out’ aspects of a ‘journey’. Truth, journeying, and the details of the route-to-be-journeyed are thus all linked within one discursive and conceptual network on the face of the altar at the heart of the agora.
There is more, however. It has sometimes been speculated that this altar should be seen as part of a larger project of spatial organization, monumentalization, and political consolidation that would also have included the installation of the celebrated herms which dotted the roads of Attica, reportedly erected by Peisistratus’ uncle, Hipparchus.Footnote 54 These road markers, set up at the halfway points between the town centre (presumably measured from the Altar of the Twelve Gods) and the deme to which the road led, bore on one face information about the journey being undertaken (notifying travellers that they were halfway between the town and their destination) and on the other a moralizing or philosophical maxim devised (or at any rate selected) by Hipparchus.Footnote 55 Fortunately, the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Hipparchus records two of the maxims inscribed by the Athenian tyrant: ‘walk thinking just thoughts’ (στεῖχε δίκαια φρονῶν) and ‘do not deceive a friend’ (μὴ φίλον ἐξαπάτα).Footnote 56 These peculiar objects take on a particular charge and interpretive frisson in light of Parmenides’ poem insofar as they, too, form an explicit link between roads, travelling, and what we would now call philosophical (or at least ethical or moralizing) thinking. Indeed, the unique form of the herm embodies in and of itself this (very Parmenidean) linkage between the itinerary of a voyage and philosophical or moralizing thought, expressing it in the form of a single, unified object: two faces, very literally, of the same stele.
Proper consideration of the possible links between the herms and Parmenides’ poem is undertaken in Chapter 6, when Parmenides’ poem itself will be examined, but Mourelatos’s interpretation of Parmenides’ notion of a sēma which stands ‘on the hodos’ of inquiry (Fr. 8.2–3) is evocative enough in this setting to deserve being mentioned, even briefly, at this juncture:
In Parmenides’ own language: To reach the goal of the ‘quest,’ we must go by the route ‘is.’ To stay on that route, we must keep an eye on the ‘signposts’ along the way. To be faithful to the imagery, we might think of the signposts as imperatives like: ‘always look for that which is simple, immobile, complete.’ Parmenides puts this less expressively by saying: ‘along the route there are many signposts that [or “as to how”] …’.
Seen against Mourelatos’s characterization of Parmenides’ sēmata, we may say (without wishing to press the claim too hard) that Hipparchus’ herms, likely built not so long before Parmenides’ poem was composed, offer an extremely arresting set of possible parallels.Footnote 58
The herms and the road network connecting the demes to Attica are, of course, deeply tied up with several dynamics specific to that region, especially those related to the consolidation of Athenian political power and the relationship between the central city and the demes.Footnote 59 The use of road markers and road signs in archaic Greece was, however, by no means limited to Attica. A road sign or signpost (the French excavators refer to it is a ‘stèle indicatrice’) from the island of Thasos has been securely dated to the decade between 450 and 440 BCE.Footnote 60 This ‘stèle indicatrice’, located in a sanctuary at the south-eastern tip of the island, lists the distances from the marker to two other points on the island, the polis (on the northern coast), by way of Ainyra, and a location known as the ‘Diasion’ in the (village or town of) Demetrion (presumably in the south-west quadrant of the island); below this, we then get a third distance, from the ‘Diasion’ to the polis by way of a seaside route (peri thalassan) that presumably traces out the circumference of the island’s western and northern coasts.Footnote 61 The Altar of the 12 Gods and Hipparchus’ network of herms were hardly unique.
Emerging from both literary and archaeological evidence, then, is a picture that becomes highly suggestive when viewed alongside Parmenides’ use of the language and imagery of roads, travelling, and journeying. In concluding this discussion of the physical nature and social function of archaic and classical Greek roads as realia, I would like to highlight two points most of all. First, that we should find the distinctive nexus comprising the practice or concept of journeying, information about an itinerary, philosophical or moralizing maxims, and claims about truth – all apparently Parmenidean – linked in various ways on several road signs or spatial markers in the later archaic and classical period offers us a valuable invitation to reassess aspects of Parmenides’ poem that critics have found confusing or simply ignored. The second point, which is perhaps even more consequential, concerns the implications we may draw from considering the techniques of archaic Greek road construction and the mechanics of travel these dictated for journeying by wheeled vehicle. More specifically, the archaic and classical Greek hodos for wheeled vehicles, a rut road that locked the vehicles that travelled on it into a prescribed track, offered Parmenides a tremendously powerful conceptual resource. In Chapter 6 I shall examine the claim that one of Parmenides’ major undertakings is to articulate some means of ‘reach[ing] toward a new notion of metaphysical or logical necessity’.Footnote 62 Ultimately, I shall argue that invoking the image of the archaic Greek rut road (and the prescribed motion along a track that it entails) – now in the form of a hodos dizēsios that leads necessarily from point to point in sequence across the terrain of an argument – is one of Parmenides’ most important strategies for accomplishing this goal.
The erection of different kinds of road markers or road signs and the creation of a network of road signs and systems of organizing and systematizing travel by road seem to have occurred more or less during Parmenides’ lifetime. These developments should be viewed in relation to processes of territorial consolidation and the monumentalization of architecture occurring in the same years, but that is not an argument against keeping them in mind as we read Parmenides’ poem. Just the opposite. If his was a time when space, by virtue of being incorporated into the framework of the polis and its ritual, political, and economic linkages, became increasingly measured, marked, signed, controlled, ordered, regularized, and systematized, what better model could he have found to impose order on discursive space than a hodos dizēsios: the route, journey, or road of inquiry?
1.2 The Semantics of the word hodos
We have seen, then, what a hodos was in archaic Greece. But what did the Greeks mean by the word hodos? The main aim of this section is to map out the relevant portions of this word’s semantic field in Homer.
This task is pertinent to our understanding of Parmenides on three counts. The first concerns the polysemous nature of the word hodos. As is increasingly recognized, Parmenides had a subtle but devastating talent for wordplay more generally, and for capitalizing on linguistic ambiguities of precisely this sort more specifically.Footnote 63 The study undertaken in this section will help us appreciate how central this technique was to Parmenides’ rhetorical and poetic – that is, meaning-making – strategies. Recognizing that Parmenides’ central, programmatic word hodos has two distinct meanings is thus a matter of no small hermeneutic urgency. As we shall explore below, the word hodos can signify either a kind of physical object or a kind of activity. That the same word encompasses both senses offers Parmenides a resource he exploits with virtuosic skill; the effect, of enormous importance to his project, is to yoke together both senses, each of which offers him something crucial and distinctive, and to harness their combined power in the service of mediating a new concept of the nature of thinking and knowing. It is strategies like this that help Parmenides wring the most power out of the linguistic tools available to him, the better to think new thoughts in and through old words.Footnote 64
This urgency deepens when we take into account what the two specific meanings of the word hodos are. The second point concerns the value of the first meaning of hodos to Parmenides’ purposes. As we shall explore in Section 1.2.1, when the word hodos signifies an object, this is often an object of the sort discussed in Section 1.1, namely, a road suitable for wheeled traffic. As we saw, once one sets out on such a road, one is committed to follow it until it ends; wheels locked in the ruts, one cannot swerve, deviate, or circle back from the prescribed path. As we shall examine in Chapter 6, this provides Parmenides with a crucial – and, to date, entirely unobserved and unexamined – resource for groping towards a primordial articulation of what would come to be called logical necessity.
Similarly, the third point concerns the value of the second meaning of hodos to Parmenides’ larger endeavour. As we shall discuss in Section 1.2.2, when the word hodos signifies an activity, it is something intrinsically teleological, something, that is, inherently directed towards a terminal destination and a conclusive goal. This basic fact of the meaning of hodos imparts a distinctive conceptual footprint to Parmenides’ hodos dizēsios. The significance of this conceptual footprint must be evaluated in light of the third feature common to Parmenides’ argument and the paradigm of demonstration that evolves from it identified by Lloyd: that both proceed to an inescapable conclusion.Footnote 65 In short, the inescapability comes from the sense of a hodos as an object, the conclusiveness from the sense of hodos as an activity. These are topics we shall take up more fully in Chapter 6; in this chapter, I merely lay the groundwork for the analysis to be undertaken there.
I have elsewhere conducted a more comprehensive study of the semantics of road-related words in Homer.Footnote 66 There, I discuss at greater length the framework I shall assume below; this centres on the distinction between a sense of hodos that denotes an object, and another that denotes an activity. We shall examine each in turn.
1.2.1 The hodos as an Object
In contrast to keleuthoi, which (in the plural) are paths of some kind, usually through the sea or the heavens, and thus generally part of the natural constitution of the world, the hodos as an object is almost invariably part of the built landscape;Footnote 67 generally speaking, a hodos is constructed.Footnote 68 When Nestor first proposes that the Achaeans build the wall guarding their ships, he ends by singling out the importance of building gates into this wall (Il. 7.340):
This is not a throw-away phrase; the line is repeated when the Achaeans do, in fact, complete these gates a hundred lines later (Il. 7.439). The product of deliberate foreplanning and laborious construction (as we are reminded when Apollo undoes all this fine work in an instant; cf. Il. 15.355–58, Il. 15.260–61), this ἱππηλασίη ὁδός provides an illuminating point of contrast to a functionally similar entity, one that also takes horse-drawn vehicles from one side of the Achaean fortifications to the other – the passage ‘bridged’ by Apollo in Iliad 15. The former is the product of planned, organized construction, the latter an ad hoc creation produced in an instant and by a foot, stemming from the exigencies of the moment. The first is a hodos, the second a keleuthos.
Connected to this notion of constructedness is a sense of purposiveness: a hodos is constructed to serve a purpose, and one more enduring than the momentary demand of siege logistics. As the phrase ἱππηλασίη ὁδός suggests, adjectives or adjectival phrases modifying the hodos as an object often refer to the kind of traffic the hodos is intended to support.Footnote 70 The association with wheeled traffic is particularly notable. Revealing here is the fateful road Odysseus’ men take en route to the palace of the Laestrygonians, along which they encounter the daughter of the local king and queen. In the event, we are told (Od. 10.103–04):
Compare this with the keleuthos that Apollo promises Hector he will ‘smooth’ (λεαίνω, Il. 15.261) before the Trojan advance. Where that keleuthos was provisional, the Laestrygonians’ ‘smooth road’ has been constructed for a specific purpose within the framework of what appears to be a larger pattern of usage (note the imperfect καταγίνεον), one that is presumably related to a regular need for timber.Footnote 71 Also related to the hamaxa is, of course, the ἁμάξιτος. While the precise role it plays in the course of Hector’s flight from Achilles in Iliad 22 is not entirely clear,Footnote 72 that the word itself, originally (and usually) an adjective modifying hodos, means ‘carriageable’, ‘able to be traversed by a hamaxa’, is clear.Footnote 73
The benefit and level of sophistication of the hodos as a ‘carriageway’ becomes obvious in the neat contrast between the Laestrygonian road and an image we find in a simile depicting Menelaus and Meriones as they labour to drag the body of Patroclus from the field (Il. 17.742–44):
Making do with a mere atarpos – a ‘beaten track’ of the rugged sort that Odysseus will have to take through wooded country and steep terrain to get from the sea-level harbour to Eumaeus’ hut inland (τρηχεῖαν ἀταρπὸν | χῶρον ἀν᾽ ὑλήεντα δι᾽ ἄκριας (Od. 14.1–2))Footnote 74 – the mules struggle mightily just to bring one beam down from the mountain; on the Laestrygonian road, one may bring it down by the wagonload.Footnote 75
Similarly, we may contrast the level of construction and sophistication associated with both the Laestrygonian wagon hodos and the ἱππηλασίη ὁδός through the gates in the Achaean wall with one of the very few Homeric examples of overland keleuthoi. After the embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9 proves fruitless, Agamemnon and Menelaus confer in the dead of night and decide to summon the Greek chieftains to a midnight council. Having settled who will go to rouse whom, Menelaus asks whether he should return to Agamemnon or stay with Ajax and Idomeneus, whom he is to visit; Agamemnon replies that the latter makes more sense, lest they miss each other in the course of their errands (Il. 10.66):
In contrast to the very limited number of specially constructed, carriageable hodoi communicating the Greek camp with the Trojan plain or serving as a landmark in Iliad 22, these seem to be merely ways of getting through the camp between the tents and the ships, ways of passage that take on a kind of object residue by being used repeatedly and habitually.Footnote 76
The contrast between the ‘many keleuthoi’ through the camp and the single ‘smooth hodos’ in the land of the Laestrygonians or three ‘hodoi suitable for wheeled traffic’ penetrating the Achaean wall (if we imagine one per gate, and three gates) is neatly exemplified in the simile used to describe Ajax as he leaps from ship to ship to fend off the Trojan advance (Il. 15.679–84):Footnote 77
The juxtaposition of the ‘many keleuthoi’ through the camp with the single λαοφόρος ὁδός is telling. In the first case, in the absence of any of the limitations imposed by the need to construct a more sophisticated hodos, the number of keleuthoi available for use proliferate to such an extent that even two individuals who are expressly seeking each other may nevertheless fail to happen upon one another. By contrast, there being but a single route along which to transport one’s team of yoked horses (or Laestrygonian timber, or Trojan wagons), the attention of the many men and women who live along the λαοφόρος ὁδός is concentrated on the single location of the road. In short, the hodos as an object signifies something that is generally constructed, built for a purpose, and, as a result, able to accommodate heavier traffic – especially, in contrast with the atarp(it)os, wheeled vehicles.
1.2.2 The hodos as an Activity
The word hodos also signifies a kind of activity. In Homer, no verb – and no cluster of words – is more closely associated with the word hodos used in this sense than those derived from τέλος, ‘end’. Such verbs take hodos as a direct object three times and are used passively with hodos as the patient subject twice more.
Closely related to this is the fact that, unlike the word keleuthos, which often appears in the middle of an episode of travel, the word hodos (especially when paired with a verb derived from τέλος) often appears either before the journey in question has occurred or after its completion. The first pairing in the Odyssey between hodos and a verb derived from τέλος takes place early, in the debate in the Ithacan agora, and provides an excellent example. Telemachus’ proposal to raise a news-gathering expedition is met with scorn by Leocritus, who suggests that Telemachus will never get around to leaving Ithaca and so ‘will never accomplish the hodos’ he wishes to undertake (τελέει δ᾽ ὁδὸν οὔ ποτε ταύτην, Od. 2.256). After Telemachus does, in fact, embark on just the journey in question, Antinous remarks (Od. 4.663–64):
The completion of the return leg of this journey – despite the suitors’ attempted ambush – occasions a virtually identical outburst from Eurymachus (Od. 16.146–47).
The same pattern of usage – namely, a verb derived from τέλος taking hodos as its object at the precise moment the journey emerges as a totality, either just before it has begun or upon its completion – characterizes Odysseus’ journeys as well as Telemachus’. When Odysseus appeals to Circe to launch him on his voyage home from Aeaea (Od. 10.483–84):
she responds, using the verb teleō as a pivot (Od. 10.491):
At the moment when Odysseus and his men are so close to completing their nostos that they descry Ithaca’s hearth fires, we find this pairing again. That their journey is to all intents and purposes finished is precisely the concern, for what his crewmates lament is that, because the journey is essentially over, they will have no further opportunity to gain the spoils of war or collect gifts from abroad – as Aeolus’ bag of winds makes it seem Odysseus has (Od. 10.41–42):
In sum, we may observe two things. First, the hodos as an activity-like concept is something that one can ‘complete’, ‘accomplish’, ‘fulfil’. Second, that it is just at the moments when one views a journey as a single, unified project to be undertaken (viewed prospectively) or already essentially completed (viewed retrospectively) that one discusses a hodos and does so in terms expressed by verbs derived from τέλος.Footnote 78
The association between the word hodos and words derived from τέλος is not limited to the relationship between verb and patient. When Athena encourages Telemachus in the aftermath of the agora debate, she claims that, just as his father, Odysseus (Od. 2.272–73),
Athena’s assimilation of ‘accomplishing’ something – an ergon, an epos – to a hodos that is not ‘vain’ or ‘unfulfilled’ reveals another aspect of this meaning of hodos. The adjectives ἁλίη and ἀτέλεστος represent a key cluster of modifiers associated with the hodos as an activity-like concept in the Odyssey.Footnote 79 These feature most prominently in the discussions surrounding Telemachus’ journey. In a reprise of the debate in the agora, the suitors respond to his proposed hodos with the same contempt displayed by Leocritus; this time, Telemachus stands his ground, declaring (Od. 2.318):
Not long after he completes the first leg of the journey in question, another authority figure, this time Nestor, urges Telemachus onwards by invoking the same notion, in this case the spectre of a τηϋσίη ὁδóς, a ‘fruitless hodos’, that must be avoided (Od. 3.316 = Od. 15.13; Athena delivers the second admonition). Closely related, then, to the notion of accomplishing, completing, fulfilling a hodos is a concern with the hodos that is potentially ἀτέλεστος, ἁλίη, or τηϋσίη, ‘unfulfilled, fruitless’, ‘vain’, ‘useless’.
The sense mobilized here extends beyond a journey that is simply unfinished or incomplete – one that somehow terminated before its scheduled point of conclusion – to suggest that a notion of purposiveness is inherent in the words these adjectives modify; an ‘unfulfilled’ hodos would not be one that is merely unfinished, but one that fails to fulfil or accomplish its purpose. The point can be expressed in two possible ways. The more modest claim is that, just as ‘a stone can be sightless but not blind’ (for ‘to be blind requires that one be in the sight game’),Footnote 80 so in order for a hodos to be ἀ-τέλεστος, ἁλίη, τηϋσίη, ‘unaccomplished, fruitless’, ‘vain’, ‘useless’, it would have to be in the ‘accomplishment’, ‘fruitfulness’, or ‘usefulness’ game to begin with. A hodos, then, would be a notion with just such a nature that it is susceptible to predications involving the notion of purposiveness. Second, given the frequency with which the predications in question are made, we could push the point further and say that not only is purposiveness an inherent aspect of the notion of a hodos as an activity-like concept, but it is one of the aspects of this notion emphasized most prominently in Homeric usage.
Moreover, specific purposes are frequently attributed to this or that hodos used as an activity-like concept. This is most commonly expressed via a verb of motion used in conjunction with a future participle. In fact, a number of the passages we have reviewed do precisely this. Exemplary again is the rest of Circe’s reply to Odysseus when the latter asks her to ‘fulfil her promise’ (Od. 10.491–94):
We shall see in other passages below how frequently the ‘verb of motion + future participle’ construction appears alongside the word hodos. While the nexus of adjectives identified above demonstrates the intrinsic relationship between the hodos as an activity-like concept and a sense of purposiveness more generally, this sense is often rendered explicit by the use of grammatical constructions that specify a particular purpose associated with a particular hodos.
Similarly, the word hodos is often accompanied by a pair of lexical items: the spatial affix -δε and the preposition εἰς, both of which identify a clear spatial goal or destination.Footnote 81 When Odysseus calls on Circe to ‘fulfil her promise to him’ (τέλεσόν μοι ὑπόσχεσιν ἥν περ ὑπέστης, Od. 10.483) this promise consists in ‘guiding (me) homewards’ (οἴκαδε πεμψέμεναι, Od. 10.484). Her response, we saw, redirects this hodos towards another destination: to the underworld (Od. 10.491). For his part, Odysseus casts this sense of destinationality into sharp relief by echoing Circe’s line initial εἰς Ἀίδαο, again emphasizing the destination (Od. 10.501–02):
This exchange mirrors the opening scene of the Telemachy proper. There, too, a female divinity proleptically narrates to another member of the House of Laertes a hodos that he ought to accomplish;Footnote 82 in this case, of course, it is Athena, disguised as Mentor, who sets the poem’s plot in motion by addressing Telemachus as follows (Od. 1.279–90):
Just as Circe’s hodos was to the house of Hades and dread Persephone in order to consult the spirit of Tiresias, so Athena spells out a clear itinerary: first to Pylos to talk to Nestor, then to Sparta to Menelaus, and finally back to Ithaca (and, again, in the service a clearly defined goal – gathering news about Odysseus – designated through the same purpose construction). Characteristic of the discourse of the hodos is the appearance of place-names-cum-destinations tagged with the local, direction-indicating lexemes -δε and εἰς. Whether one is completing a hodos, narrating a hodos, or guiding someone else’s hodos, in the Odyssey the hodos in question is a hodos to somewhere.Footnote 83
It may prove useful at this juncture to introduce a pair of distinctions from the linguistic analysis of verbal aspect and philosophical analysis of action: that between the perfective and imperfective, and between events and processes, respectively.Footnote 84 Introducing these terms is an act of bricolage, not engineering; these two dichotomies provide models from which we may usefully draw inspiration, and I wish to stress that they are to be understood here as serving a purely provisional, heuristic role.
Verbal aspects are ‘different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation’.Footnote 85 The fundamental distinction in the domain of aspect is between the so-called perfective and imperfective.Footnote 86 The perfective ‘presents the totality of the situation referred to’, which is to say that ‘the situation is presented as a single … whole’; the perfective aspect can therefore be said to depict the situation ‘from the outside’.Footnote 87 The imperfective ‘make[s] explicit reference to the internal temporal constituency of the situation’; it may therefore be said to look at the situation ‘from the inside’.Footnote 88
The aptness with which this description of the perfective can be applied to the relationship between the word hodos and verbs derived from τέλος is evident. In the situations discussed – Telemachus’ proposal in the agora; the suitors’ dismay at his departure for, and then successful return from, the mainland; the resentment of Odysseus’ crewmates as Ithaca hoves into view – there is no interest in the internal dynamics, phenomenological experience, or series of individual actions that make up the hodos discussed. Instead, the emphasis falls on the journey understood as a ‘single whole’ presented ‘in totality’ and viewed, whether after the fact or before it, ‘from the outside’.Footnote 89
Second, we observed that in the cases where verbs derived from τέλος are involved, the hodos in question is yet to be embarked upon or has already been completed (or virtually so). This is a phenomenon that holds more generally across nearly all uses of the word hodos as activity-like concept; if aspect matters, so, too, does tense. Notably common is the relationship between the hodos and the future tense. The exchange between Odysseus and Circe is again exemplary. Odysseus responds to Circe’s injunction to ‘accomplish another hodos’ by asking (Od. 10.503):
The pairing of this particular verb with hodos as its object is also characteristic; on two other occasions we find characters who volunteer to provide just this service.Footnote 90 Another common pairing sees hodos stand with a future form of εἰμί or one of its compounds.Footnote 91 Fresh from the Ithacan agora, Athena reassures Telemachus (Od. 2.272):
and repeats this encouragement, retracing the arc of ring-composed exhortation (Od. 2.285):
Laodamas, the impertinent Phaeacian nobleman who challenges Odysseus to try his hand at the discus, repeats the claim verbatim (Od. 8.150): the future journey to be taken from Ithaca to the mainland, or from Scheria to Ithaca, lies ahead of each pair of interlocutors, both of whom view it ‘from the outside’, as a ‘totality’ and a ‘single whole’.Footnote 92
It is not enough, however, to observe that a hodos presents a journey in its totality as a single whole as if ‘from the outside’. As the persistent linkage with words derived from τέλος suggests and the affiliation with the complex of adjectives, the purpose construction, and the directional indicators -δε and εἰς confirm, the single whole the hodos represents is teleological. That is to say, it is constituted in relation to an end – an end-as-destination and an end-as-purpose. As we have seen, a hodos is a hodos to somewhere in particular, a hodos one travels for a purpose.
One element of the definition of ‘perfective’ given above can be examined further in relation to the ‘activity-like concept’ sense of hodos: this is the claim that the perfective presents a situation in totality as a single whole ‘without reference to its internal temporal constituency’. In fact, as we shall explore at much greater length in chapters 3 and 4, the hodos as an activity-like concept is intimately concerned with the internal structure of the single whole it presents; it is simply interested in this internal structure in a way that differs markedly from the depiction of the ‘internal temporal constituency’ effected by keleuthos. Introducing the second distinction, between ‘events’ and ‘processes’, can explain this difference more precisely.
The distinction emerges at the intersection of linguistics and philosophy. At its modern base is the Kenny–Vendler classification of what may be referred to as ‘situations’ (Figure 1.1).Footnote 93 Here it may be useful to present the schema with examples.Footnote 94
Figure 1.1 Modified Kenny–Vendler typology
What is crucial here is the distinction between ‘processes’ and ‘events’ (and ultimately between ‘processes’ and ‘accomplishments’). Unlike processes, events are ‘telic’; that is, they ‘have the fuller integration implied by the posit of reaching a goal or giving closure to a process’.Footnote 95
‘Events’ can be further split into ‘accomplishments’ and ‘achievements’, distinguished by whether or not the action ‘is conceived of as lasting a certain period of time’.Footnote 96 While achievements ‘capture either the inception or the climax of an act’ but ‘cannot in themselves occur over or throughout a temporal stretch’, accomplishments ‘have duration intrinsically’.Footnote 97 This combination of the durative and the telic, then – the fusion of ‘a process leading up to the terminal point as well as the terminal point’ – provides the essential qualities of the accomplishment.Footnote 98 It also gives us an important insight into the power and capaciousness of the hodos as an activity-like concept to encompass a wide range of phenomena and experiences, processes and products within its basic conceptual framework.
There is one final distinction between ‘processes’ and ‘accomplishments’ that is relevant. Processes are ‘homogeneous’: ‘if “Jones is … running for half an hour,” then it must be true that “he is … running for every time stretch within that period”’.Footnote 99 By contrast, accomplishments are ‘heterogeneous: “in case I wrote a letter in an hour, I did not write it, say, in the first quarter of that hour”’.Footnote 100 The homogeneity of processes can be assimilated to that of ‘mass terms’ (as opposed to ‘count terms’); ‘bottle’ and ‘necklace’ can be identified as discrete, countable items whereas ‘wine’ and ‘gold’ are mass terms, not discrete, countable items. Mass terms ‘generally do not have plural forms, or if they do there is a meaning shift: wines are types of wine’.Footnote 101 Closely related to this is a difference in the nature of the structure or internal constitution of that which is denoted by the term in question: a bottle is not made up of other bottles nor a necklace of necklaces, in the way that gold is made up of more gold or wine of more wine.
We may take the second point first. Recalling that the hodos Athena ‘made manifest’ to Telemachus was defined by the sequence of destinations it encompassed (to Pylos, then Sparta, then back home) and the purpose for which it was undertaken, we may speak of the hodos as being concerned with the inner constitution of the journey to be taken understood as a whole, the series of distinct and identifiable items that together constitute the skeleton of the route. Likewise, Leocritus uses the word hodos when he casts doubt on Telemachus’ fundamental ability to undertake the journey (i.e. as a whole) at all. What is at issue for Telemachus at this stage is not where he ought to go or mustering the will to do so (he has already received Athena’s instructions and pep talk), but rather mustering the specific means to get from point A to point B (Od. 2.212–13):
The ensuing discussion in the agora concerning the itinerary and the journey-as-a-whole sees the word hodos used repeatedly (five times in 200-odd lines, one of the highest concentrations of the word hodos in the course of Homer), but the actual setting sail and the sailing itself is twice referred to as a keleuthos. In short, when the actual process of travelling is in question, the word keleuthos is used; when the structure of the route or the entirety of the journey is in question, we find the word hodos.
1.2.3 Towards a telos
There is a fundamental distinction between two senses of the word hodos in Homer: one denotes (a) an object, and the other (b) an activity. Understood as an object (a), a hodos is usually a built road, one that passes over land and often supports wheeled traffic (i.e. a ‘rut road’). One of its primary referents is the object discussed in Section 1.1 above – the rut-road hodos that leads those who travel upon it, wheels locked into the track, unyieldingly, inexorably, necessarily, from a point of origin to a prescribed destination. Understood as an activity (b), a hodos, like the perfective (the form often taken by verbs that govern hodos used in this sense), looks at the notion of the journey ‘from the outside’, that is ‘as a single, unified whole’. Moreover, the Homeric hodos activity is an ‘accomplishment’ – an activity with intrinsic duration but one linked with a clear end, an end which we have seen is an end not only in time (in the sense of closure or finality), but in space (in relation to a terminal destination) and also in relation to a goal or purpose (in the sense of accomplishment or fulfilment). We find hodos used in this sense where the emphasis is on the structural framework of the journey qua unified whole. Fundamental to the Homeric use of the word hodos in its sense as an activity is its very close ties to a range of lexical items indicating destinationality and purposiveness. The hodos as an activity, that is to say, is marked by a strong sense of teleology: a hodos is always a hodos to somewhere, undertaken for a purpose.
Looking forward to Parmenides, these distinctions bear heavily on his use of language and the resonance of the imagery he evokes. Scholars have largely failed to appreciate the complex semantics of the Homeric language in which Parmenides composes his verse, as if he were already writing a treatise in the notation of today’s formal logic and not composing a poem in dactylic hexameter. When Parmenides fashions his sequence of deductive arguments as a hodos of inquiry, we should understand this to mean travelling a hodos (b) along a hodos (a): a journey to a conclusion undertaken for the purpose of gaining knowledge along a kind of inexorable rut road inscribed into the terrain it crosses. We shall explore what exactly this means for Parmenides, his notion of what we would call logical necessity, and the shape of his hodos of inquiry in Chapter 6.
The mid- to late sixth century into which Parmenides was born was a time of profound changes that touched nearly every aspect of society, from poetry to politics, architecture to astronomy, economics to epistemology.Footnote 1 During this period and in the decades before it, new settlements, including Parmenides’ own Elea, continued to spring up all around the Mediterranean and Black Sea;Footnote 2 Persian encroachments across the Greek east scattered westward Ionian refugees and their cultural and intellectual traditions; the monumental Greek temple as we know it was coming into its own.Footnote 3 Prose was born;Footnote 4 so was the map; so, too, was (non-alloyed) money.Footnote 5 For the purposes of this chapter, however, one of the most important developments was the series of fundamental shifts that were playing out in the world of archaic poetry during this era, particularly concerning the social status and conceptualization of Homer. If sections 1.1 and 1.2 of the previous chapter located Parmenides in his physical environment and linguistic milieu, respectively, this chapter will in turn locate him in the world of late archaic poetry in which he worked.
Doing so yields three benefits. The first concerns Homer’s position of unparalleled cultural prominence and social prestige in Parmenides’ era. In recent decades, scholars have begun assembling a mosaic of evidence that suggests important changes during this time in how Homer and the poems attributed to him were conceptualized and how poets of the day interacted with him. By the late archaic period, thinking one’s social and aesthetic values, one’s views on the nature of knowledge and poetic craft through, against, or otherwise alongside Homer had become a widespread phenomenon. Moreover, when Parmenides was composing his poem, creative reappropriation of the Homeric poems was becoming an established habit. Just as we would miss something of deep importance were we to fail to appreciate the physical nature of the actual roads with which Parmenides and his audience would have been familiar, or were we to elide the semantic nuances of the road vocabulary that Parmenides makes central to his poem, so must we also grapple with how Parmenides fits into the dynamics that defined the relationship between late archaic poets and the epic poems they used and abused, adapted and critiqued. What, generally speaking, were other poets in Parmenides’ era doing?
Working and reworking Homer, and reworking Homer yet again. In this and subsequent chapters of this book, I unquestionably privilege Homer in my reading of Parmenides – perhaps, as scholars with other interpretative perspectives on Parmenides may argue, excessively so. But as scholars of late archaic poetry have recently demonstrated, and as I shall emphasize in this chapter, poets in the late archaic period accorded Homer a place of unusually exalted privliege. Accordingly, our understanding of Parmenides’ poem will benefit from incorporating the insights gained by recent scholarship on late archaic poetry generally, and the early reception of Homer more specifically. Put differently, my emphasis on reading Parmenides against Homer is simply a reflection of, and commensurate with, the level of cultural influence Homer had earned in Parmenides’ own time.Footnote 6
Second, resituating Parmenides in his time and place will open up new perspectives on the precise nature of Parmenides’ engagements with Homer. As so often when discussing both archaic Greek poetry and ‘the Presocratics’, what appears normal or exceptional often depends on how we narrativize and periodize the development of individual thinkers and patterns of thought, poets and poetic traditions, and alongside whom we do, or do not, place the poet or thinker in question. When Parmenides is viewed not as a successor to Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, or Xenophanes, nor as a predecessor to Zeno, Melissus, Empedocles, or Plato (and, eventually, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Cynics, and, ultimately, as is not uncommon, Russell and Wittgenstein, or Heidegger and Derrida), but rather alongside his late archaic companions in verse such as Ibycus, Simonides, and Pindar, we get a different picture of important features of his poem. This is particularly true concerning his use of dactylic hexameter, the dramatic scenario of his proem, his epistemological orientations and aims, and key words, phrases, and lines in his proem and the ‘Route to Truth’.
This brings us to the third, and most consequential, point. Relocating Parmenides in his poetic context will help us understand more precisely both the intellectual challenges he faced and the set of cultural and poetic resources he had at his disposal in facing them. Of central importance on this score is the extraordinary epistemological tumult of Parmenides’ era and the decades immediately preceding him. One key current in this epistemological fomentation is a poetic and intellectual tradition that runs from Hesiod by way of Xenophanes, two thinkers with whom scholars have often seen Parmenides engaging.Footnote 7 I shall thus begin this chapter by building on recent scholarship on this theme to outline the poetic and intellectual state of play that Parmenides would have inherited from these poet-thinkers, and the precise challenges their work would have presented him. Framing the discussion this way does not, however, mean we should understand this Hesiodic-Xenophanean line of thinking as disconnected from the conception of, and engagement with, Homer that seems to have played such an important role in the late archaic poetry of Parmenides’ peers and near-contemporaries; rather we must be prepared to see how these two stories intersect and are intertwined. Thus, having proceeded by way of other examples of late and mid- to late archaic engagements with Homer (especially in poems by Ibycus, Pindar, and Simonides) and the epistemological stakes at play in these engagements, I shall ultimately loop back to Parmenides’ place in the Hesiodic-Xenophanean tradition armed with fresh insights into Parmenides’ strategies for addressing the challenges this tradition presented.
To summarize: three strands of the backdrop to Parmenides must be examined. My argument in this chapter will be as follows. First, I shall set the stage by exploring the challenge to which Parmenides needed to respond and the larger epistemic framework within which he needed to work (in Section 2.1, ‘Hesiod’s Muses, Xenophanes’ Doubt’). Second, I shall look at the late archaic period’s interest in Homer, especially the Invocation of the Muses in Iliad 2, and the resources this provided Parmenides in meeting that challenge (in Section 2.2, ‘Archaic Receptions of Homer’). Third, I shall consider the larger epistemico-poetic milieu within which Parmenides would have been operating in order to appreciate more fully his response to the Hesiodic-Xenophanean tradition (in Section 2.3, ‘Poetics and Epistemology’). Finally, building on these three sections, I shall explore how Parmenides, finding himself in the situation described in the third section, deploys the resources explored in the second to overcome the challenge outlined in the first (in Section 2.4, ‘Parmenidean Strategies’).
2.1 Hesiod’s Muses, Xenophanes’ Doubt
The best way to establish the larger stakes at play in this chapter, then, is to consider Parmenides’ rather more well-established place in the poetic and intellectual tradition that begins with Hesiod and moves primarily by way of Xenophanes. Scholarship on this topic often centres on the infamous lines 27–28 of the Theogony. There the Olympian Muses, having withdrawn from their idyllic perch on ‘highest Helicon’ (Th. 25), quite literally condescend to address Hesiod while he tends his flocks in the human world below; underscoring his lowly status (Th. 26), they make the following declaration (Th. 27–28):
Shaul Tor’s recent study Mortal and Divine in Early Greek Epistemology can help us make sense of the bewildering implications of these lines and the reams of scholarship that they have justifiably provoked.Footnote 8 One of the virtues of Tor’s analysis is that it transcends the usual impasses – do Hesiod’s Muses lie to others but tell the truth to him, and, if so, does he gain knowledge from them? Do Hesiod’s Muses lie to him? Is there any way of knowing? – by reassessing the place of these lines in the Hesiodic corpus more generally. Seen from this perspective, Hesiod’s Muses are not staking out an epistemological position (that Hesiod’s Muses reject Homeric epic, for example, and authorize his own) but rather constructing an epistemological framework.Footnote 9 This framework is premised on the idea that only by interacting with the divine is Hesiod’s poetry possible, and can be broken down into three parts.Footnote 10 First (i) is the need to assess ‘what mortals and gods are like’, especially by attaining insight into the nature of ‘the epistemic capacities and limitations of mortals’; second (ii), as follows from the limitations of mortals established in the first point, ‘it is only through a special and privileged interaction with the divine that the mortal poet can produce potentially true (since divinely disclosed) accounts of matters that lie beyond human cognition’; finally (iii), ‘the mortal cannot know the truth-value of these accounts’.Footnote 11
There are two fundamental benefits to framing matters this way. First, of use both immediately and later in the chapter, this analysis allows for a concise comparison between the views of Hesiod, Xenophanes, and Parmenides.Footnote 12 Following Hesiod, both Xenophanes and Parmenides agree on the importance of point (i). Xenophanes, however, rejects the possibility of point (ii), denying that mortals (poets or otherwise) ‘can produce potentially true (since divinely disclosed) accounts of matters that lie beyond human cognition’; Xenophanes also develops a particularly strong and explicit version of point (iii).Footnote 13 This is an excellent starting point for discussing the intellectual state of play Parmenides would have inherited.
Second, of value at the end of this chapter, this perspective helps liberate us from the old dichotomy between rationality and irrationality, between reasoning and divine disclosure. More specifically, we would no longer need to see an incompatibility between the terms that form these traditional dichotomies: the reasoning in Parmenides’ poem may be intimately related to, and indeed perhaps made possible by, the fact that it is divinely disclosed.Footnote 14
Xenophanes’ rejection of point (ii) and development of point (iii) are particularly apparent in Fragment 34:Footnote 15
As has often been remarked, it is precisely the kind of poetic inspiration described in Homer’s famous Invocation of the Muses in Iliad 2 that must be at least one of the main targets of Xenophanes’ critique;Footnote 16 whatever the ambiguity embedded in Hesiod’s own poetic or theological epistemology, Xenophanes declares the hotline (or, no less importantly, the perceived and socially accredited hotline) to the Muses definitively severed. Dokos, ‘opinion’ or ‘belief’, is the best that mortals ever get.Footnote 17
Considering matters from this perspective helps us more clearly take stock of the challenges facing Parmenides and the strategies he deploys to negotiate and overcome them, a question to which I shall return in the final movement of this chapter (‘Parmenidean Strategies’). We can now summarize Parmenides’ position vis-à-vis this strand of Hesiodic-Xenophanean thinking as follows. In the background stand two Hesiodic premises. Owing to the nature of god and man, truth (because divinely disclosed) can come only via an epistemically significant interaction with the divine; nevertheless, owing to the nature of mortals’ own limitations, they cannot be certain of the truth-value of the information they receive in this transaction with divinity. The view Parmenides would oppose is expressed by Xenophanes, who flatly denies the possibility of any unmediated disclosure from divinity, and forcefully underscores the inability of mortals to know the truth (as opposed to merely believing the claims at which they arrive in the course of their inquiries).Footnote 18
In short, and setting the stage for this chapter’s final section, meeting the challenge that Xenophanes set down thus involves (a) effecting an encounter with a Muse-like divinity, that she may disclose truth, and (b) finding a way to abolish any doubt as to whether what has been disclosed actually is the truth. I shall return below to Parmenides’ strategies for meeting these challenges; in order to understand these strategies, however, it will first be necessary to examine aspects of the archaic reception of Homer (in the next section, ‘Archaic Receptions of Homer’) and the larger epistemic and poetic context in which Parmenides was working (Section 2.3, ‘Poetics and Epistemology’).
2.2 Archaic Receptions of Homer
As discussed above, with the exception of Havelock and Mourelatos, scholars have often been reluctant to read Parmenides alongside Homer. It is precisely, however, in Parmenides’ time that a revolution occurs in the way that Homer is conceptualized and, more pertinently here, that Homer ascends to the dominant cultural position with which we now associate him; one might even say that it is in this time that Homer first becomes inescapable.Footnote 19 It is during this period that the name ‘Homeros’ first appears – not incidentally, in the mouths of critics like Xenophanes, who could proclaim that ἐξ ἀρχῆς καθ᾽ Ὅμηρον ἐπεὶ μεμαθήκασι πάντες (‘from the beginning, all have learned from Homer’, B10),Footnote 20 or Heraclitus, for whom τόν τε Ὅμηρον … ἄξιον ἐκ τῶν ἀγώνων ἐκβάλλεσθαι καὶ ῥαπίζεσθαι (‘Homer deserves to be kicked out of the agōnes and beaten with a stick’, B42).Footnote 21 They would in due course be followed by, among others, Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides, though these often took a less acerbic tone.Footnote 22 In the fragments of Stesichorus (like Parmenides, a western Greek),Footnote 23 scholars now detect a level of detailed interaction with the Iliad and the Odyssey qualitatively different from anything that had come before, and recherché enough in nature to suggest an intertextual engagement.Footnote 24 In the Hymn to Apollo, speculated by some to have been performed on Delos in 523/22 BCE,Footnote 25 we see in the notorious boast concerning ‘a blind man, living in rocky Chios, all of whose songs are the best among posterity’ (H.Ap. 172–73) the first surviving allusion to Homer as the ‘absolute classic’ he has been ever since.Footnote 26 The establishment of the Great Panathenaea and the institution of regular recitations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (also possibly in 522 BCE) has long been advanced as another seminal moment reflecting (or announcing) the canonicity of Homer, the stabilization of the Homeric text, or both.Footnote 27 Perhaps his first out-and-out literary critic, the allegorist Theagenes of Rhegium (a polis not far from Elea)Footnote 28 seems to date from around this time as well.Footnote 29
The tremendous impact of this shift on late archaic cultural production has been carefully examined in the last several decades. One particularly rich vein of this scholarship explores the relationship between Odysseus’ preamble to the Phaeacians at Od. 9.2–11, the so-called ‘Golden Verses’, and different kinds of late archaic poetry and thought, particularly in relation to the symposium.Footnote 30 This is not the place to delve into this scholarship, but a few of its key findings, which encompass a range of late archaic poets and thinkers including Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Simonides, Bacchylides, and Pindar, may be listed here. One is that addressing the question of ‘what is finest’ that Odysseus broaches in Od. 9.2–11 became central to the process of self-fashioning in sympotic poetry and its associated cultural milieu.Footnote 31 Another, notable in the context of Parmenides’ relationship to Homer, is that one strategy for answering this question successfully involved quoting, troping, recontextualizing, and reworking bits of the Homeric text.Footnote 32 Finally, this in turn reveals the enormous cultural prestige attached to the lines of Homer; as Andrew Ford’s discussion of the citation of Il. 6.146 in Simonides 19 (IEG) makes clear, these lines ‘draw their authority from being accepted as words said by Homer himself and not by another’.Footnote 33 In sum, this strand of scholarship gives us a window onto a cultural milieu where chunks of Homeric text were a kind of precious metal that could be collected, beaten into new forms, recast with one’s own visage imprinted on the front, and put into circulation anew. Homerizing, that is, was rampant in the late archaic period.
These well-known points are worth recapitulating here for two reasons. First, my argument in subsequent chapters relies on Parmenides’ dealing with something like the Odyssey that we have now. I say ‘like’ because the core of the analysis I shall undertake below does not ultimately hinge on word-by-word intertextual readings.Footnote 34 Nevertheless, there are many features shared by Parmenides’ poem and Homer’s text (particularly Odyssey 12, my main point of comparison in chapters 3–6) that do take place at the level of language; and since Parmenides, if he engaged with Homer’s Odyssey 12 word by word, line by line,Footnote 35 would have had to have done so with some version of the Odyssey, I shall not shy away from presuming an intertextual relationship between the two poems at times to bolster my case. It is therefore very helpful – though again, in the last analysis, not absolutely necessary – to proceed on the basis that the Odyssey 12 that Parmenides would have encountered closely resembled the one we have at our disposal today.Footnote 36
Second, that Homer was ascending to a place of unparalleled prestige in the late archaic era is a point that, as we have seen, has been severely underappreciated by scholars of Parmenides. Exploring what this widespread ‘Homerizing’ during the late archaic era meant for Parmenides’ contemporaries, and especially his fellow poets, will provide a crucial context for my own interpretation of Parmenides. With this background in mind, my next goal in this chapter will be to examine a specific example that demonstrates these dynamics at work in the late archaic era. In particular, a brief look at a series of receptions of Homer’s Invocation of the Muses from Iliad 12, in Ibycus’ so-called ‘Polycrates Ode’, Pindar’s Paean 6 and Paean 7b, and Simonides’ ‘Plataea Elegy’, will provide powerful evidence of the kind of detailed engagement with a Homeric text very much resembling our own that I think we should see in Parmenides’ poem (Section 2.2.1, ‘Invoking the Muse(s)’).Footnote 37 On the other hand, juxtaposing the overlaps between Solon’s so-called ‘Eunomia’ (3 G.-P.= 4 W2) and Homer and between Parmenides’ poem and Homer (Section 2.2.2, ‘Far from the Beaten Track of Men’), a brief digression from my larger argument, will also bring into sharp focus aspects of Parmenides’ poem that have often been acknowledged but are not always discussed at the length they deserve.
2.2.1 Invoking the Muse(s)
So begins one of the most memorable and distinctive passages in the entire Homeric corpus, the Invocation of the Muses (Il. 2.484–93) that precedes the Catalogue of Ships (2.494–759).Footnote 38
Although it used to be commonly assumed that poets throughout the archaic period engaged with the Homeric poems in a detailed, textualized way, scholars now take a more cautious view regarding such early archaic poets as Archilochus, Mimnermus, and Alcman.Footnote 39 How best to assess the relationship between archaic poetry and Homeric epic remains one of the thornier problems occupying scholars of ancient Greek literature.Footnote 40 Even so, with Ibycus’ so-called ‘Polycrates Ode’, almost certain to have been written before Polycrates’ demise in 522 BCE (and perhaps dating from as early as c. 560 BCE),Footnote 41 even sceptical scholars have found firmer ground upon which to posit an intertextual engagement with Homer.Footnote 42 The Invocation of the Muses and Catalogue of Ships in Iliad 2 are widely agreed to be a major point of reference;Footnote 43 one finds Homeric resonances that run the gamut from Ibycus’ use of particles to his compressed treatment of the Catalogue of Ships.Footnote 44 Most pertinently here, as in the Invocation of the Muses, Ibycus juxtaposes the limited capabilities of the mortal poet to the superior powers of the Muses.Footnote 45
Similarly, Pindar’s Paean 6.50–61 and Paean 7b.10–20 seem to interact closely with the Iliad’s Invocation of the Muses.Footnote 46 Here Pindar, too, mirrors specific features of the Invocation’s phraseology and grammar, especially in Paean 6.54–57.Footnote 47 More notably here, in contrast to the omniscience attributed to the Muses, mortal men are in both cases expressly characterized by their fundamentally limited epistemic status.Footnote 48 As Pindar puts it (Pae. 6.51–53):Footnote 49
Similar dynamics define the scenario in Paean 7b.15–20.Footnote 50
Scholars have also found much in Simonides’ so-called ‘Plataea Elegy’ that echoes the Invocation of the Muses and the Catalogue of Ships, especially in different aspects of its apparent sequence and structure.Footnote 51 Most saliently for the present discussion, much of the oblique reference to Homer in lines 15–18 seems to be a summary of the Invocation of the Muses (15–17):Footnote 52
The foregoing cases, however briefly sketched, provide a programmatic set of examples supporting the view that in the late archaic period, poets working across a range of genres, from elegy to epinician to the paean, were engaged in a deep and fine-grained way with what seems to be a fixed text of Homer that resembled our own. More specifically, Iliad 2’s Invocation of the Muses, one of the very few places in Homer where the poet/narrator does identify himself (or herself) in the first person and speak directly in his (or her) own voice, seems to have been an object of unusual fascination for poets in this period.Footnote 53 We shall return to this point in the final section of this chapter (‘Parmenidean Strategies’).
2.2.2 Far from the Beaten Track of Men
First, however, it will be beneficial to entertain a brief digression contrasting Parmenides’ relationship to Homer with that of Solon’s so-called ‘Eunomia’ (3 G.-P.2 = 4 W2) to Od. 9.2–11. Most pertinent are lines 7–10:Footnote 54
It is not possible to pin down the precise relationship between Solon’s poem and the Odyssey with much confidence.Footnote 56 Be that as it may, the breadth and depth of this poem’s parallels with Od. 9.2–11 justify its inclusion in this discussion, as does the striking way this handful of lines presents many of the paradigmatic items of vocabulary and concerns of elegiac poetry.Footnote 57 As Odysseus establishes links between euphrosynē (Od. 9.6), the dēmos (Od. 9.6), and the orderliness of the banqueters (hēmenoi hekseiēs, Od. 9.8), so Solon’s poem links these elements in their absence from the disorderly city (cf. ll. 9–10).Footnote 58 In both cases, the feast and feast-like setting of the symposium frame reflections on man’s place in the world in respect to material abundance, good governance, society at large, and the question of justice more broadly.Footnote 59
In this, the relationship between these portions of the Odyssey and Solon’s ‘Eunomia’ (however we should understand it) provides a striking point of contrast with Parmenides. Too often, perhaps, we are in a hurry to pinpoint – or litigate – connections between passages of archaic poetry and Homer, rather than considering which specific portions of Homer may be connected to these passages – and, most importantly, why.
The similarities between Odysseus’ observations at the well-laid table of Alcinous and its negative image in the perverted feasts of the suitors and the disorderly tables of Solon’s city in turmoil are in every sense a world apart from Parmenides’ poem. This also suggests an important contrast between Parmenides’ poem and the genre of elegy of which Solon’s is so fine a specimen. With the heroic feast and the institution of the symposium, we arrive at the heart of archaic sites of reflection on well-ordered forms of human society and right relations between men. Unlike epic, elegy takes place not in the distant past of heroes but in the time of men; a common topic is the history of the symposiasts’ polis, and recounting this in the elite, aristocratic setting of the symposium consolidates a shared class identity by emphasizing the basis on which it is asserted.
One could hardly think of a topic or set of concerns more remote from Parmenides’ sphere of interest. His poem is precisely not grounded in the time of men; unlike elegiac poetry, its theme has precisely nothing to with the common past of any specific class, or any particular polis, its history, foundation myths and common heroes, or collective identity.Footnote 60 In fact, a considerable portion of the proem’s labours are dedicated to distinguishing the nature and context of the poem as emphatically as possible from the world of men in which the civically oriented poetry of the sympotic or ‘historical’ elegists is embedded. If the city is mentioned (Fr. 1.3), it is left behind immediately;Footnote 61 from the opening lines of the proem, the poem is located ‘far from the beaten track of men’ (ἀπ’ ἀνθρώπων ἐκτὸς πάτου, Fr. 1.27). Similarly, if any question concerning man’s fate arises in the proem, this is only for it to be dismissed quickly by the divinity into whose protective custody the kouros is taken (e.g. Fr. 1.26, where it is announced that no ‘evil fate’ [μοῖρα κακή] has brought the kouros this far). Similarly, Parmenides’ poem is untouched by words of, for example, the semantic fields of hybris (cf. ‘Eunomia’ 8), euphrosynē (cf. ‘Eunomia’ 9), the atē family, habrosynē, or any of the other terms used so ubiquitously in elegy to invoke the just calibration of cause and effect, behaviour and consequence, action and outcome. Parmenides’ grand but static Dike guards the entrance to the goddesses’ transcendental Beyond, her agency restricted to the domain of guardswoman and gatekeeper (Fr. 1.14–17) – a far cry from the vast supervisory and regulatory power she is arrogated by Solon, for example.Footnote 62 Though the greeting between goddess and mortal is warm, we find no hint of feasting, the drinking of wine, or anything that hints at sympotic practice or culture.Footnote 63 Similarly, there can be no question of the right relations between man and his city, or even man and his fellow man, for it is precisely to leave behind the world of men that the proem marshals its resources. Considering the portions of the Odyssey that archaic poets found useful for articulating their perspectives (or at least resembled when they did so) dramatically underscores that, by contrast, the world of Parmenides’ poem is a world specifically devoid of other men and their institutions, their division of wealth, responsibility in war, or the prerogatives of high status in the social order.
Equally telling is the portion of the Odyssey with which Parmenides does engage.Footnote 64 This, too, can be found in the stories Odysseus embarks upon in his speech to Alcinous: the first half of Odyssey 12, at just the moment when Odysseus finally prepares to depart from Circe’s never-never island paradise (to be discussed below in Chapter 4). As scholars have pointed out, this episode in many respects represents a climax of the fairy-tale ambience of the Apologoi, the Elsewhere par excellence against which the Odyssey articulates its conception of normal human relationships.Footnote 65 Arguably, no portion of Homer stands more aloof from the polis and its metonyms than this divine fantasy.
The inverse point can also be made. Though we are very largely dependent here on what the trash heaps of Egypt disgorge, the evidence we do have suggests that the Circe episode does not seem to have been tremendously popular in the archaic era.Footnote 66 Nor does the existing inventory of pottery (again, a regrettably fragmentary source of evidence) suggest that artists working in other media were more enthusiastic. This, too, is instructive. It is not difficult to discern why this passage should have held such little allure for elegiac poets at the same time as Parmenides found it so attractive, just as the reverse is true for Od. 9.2–11.
A similar set of points can also be made about Parmenides’ engagement with Hesiod.Footnote 67 Scholars of elegiac poetry have a long history of examining the importance of Hesiod for elegiac poets.Footnote 68 As the ‘Golden Verses’ of the Odyssey and other scenes from the world of mortals, such as Odysseus’ interactions with the wicked suitors, provided an appealing intertextual opportunity to reflect on the social order and the nature of justice human and divine, so it is Hesiod’s Works and Days that accounts for the lion’s share of archaic elegy’s engagements with Hesiod.
The Hesiod we find in Parmenides, however, is not the stern moralist of the Works and Days but the Muse-sponsored conduit of facts about the cosmos we find in the Theogony.Footnote 69 In the proem especially, scholars have observed a number of striking intertextual links between Parmenides and Hesiod.Footnote 70 As has been much discussed, lines 1.11–20 of Parmenides’ proem contain many points of contact with Theogony 736–66, where Hesiod describes the ‘great bronze threshold’ that leads to the Underworld.Footnote 71 The Hesiod that interests Parmenides, and whose words and images he reworks, is the Hesiod who sings the birth of gods and the structure of the cosmos, not the poet of well-tilled soil and the righteous hearth. What place could a discussion of an Iron Age, or a jeremiad lamenting its arrival, have in Parmenides’ poem?
2.3 Poetics and Epistemology
Homerizing, then, was a widespread phenomenon in the time of Parmenides, but Parmenides’ engagements with Homer are distinctive in ways that bring into sharp focus defining features of his poem. As we move now towards the larger stakes involved in Parmenides’ relationship to Homer, it is important to put the foregoing discussion of the importance of Iliad 2 for late archaic moments in its broader social and intellectual context. Of central importance will be the question of what kind of claim to truth – and made by whom – would have been possible in Parmenides’ time.
We discussed above the powerful currents of epistemological change, driven in part by thinkers such as Xenophanes, that swept through the mid- to late archaic world.Footnote 72 Into this world of changing knowledge entered a dizzying array of new men, each staking their claim to wisdom and the truth – statesman-sages, cosmologists, mythographers, physicians, as well as diviners, prophets, seers, and other clairvoyants claiming insight into the will of the gods.Footnote 73 Alongside these social and political developments, the more widespread advent of writing, as well as an increasingly pervasive process of the Panhellenization of myth, may well have resulted in the proliferation of incompatible versions of the same myths, whose differences, now being fixed in writing for comparison, were more conspicuous.Footnote 74 In short, Parmenides was born into a time of radical epistemological fomentation.
The various late archaic echoes of the Invocation of the Muses examined above provide a fascinating glimpse (albeit through the distinctive lens of poetry) into this changing conceptualization of knowledge by allowing us to trace the shifting contours of the relationship between poet and Muse. One way to tell the story of these shifting contours requires us to set matters against the backdrop of epic (or at least Homeric epic) as characterized by, and itself embodying, a maximalist conception of truth and truthfulness. Scholars have developed this conception through a variety of rubrics, which include a ‘poetics of truth’, complemented in turn by a ‘rhetoric of traditionality’ (and, alongside this, a ‘rhetoric of universality’ and a ‘rhetoric of indifference’), grounded in part within a ‘semblance of fixity’ of epic language and its status as ‘special speech’, and the ‘traditional referentiality’ characteristic of bardic practice.Footnote 75
According to the notion of a poetics of truth, the Muses are understood very literally to be eyewitnesses who have first-hand knowledge of the events to be narrated, and they convey these accurately, completely, and unproblematically to the bard via divine inspiration; he in turn acts as their mouthpiece, transmitting the information the Muses have witnessed first-hand directly through his song.Footnote 76 This poetics of truth is expressed through, and supported and complemented by, the rhetorical stances characteristic of Homeric epic listed above.Footnote 77 These stances have been discussed partly in terms of epic’s general reluctance to foreground the persona of the poet. If the poet’s persona is often introduced for the purpose of establishing a relationship with a specific audience, keeping the individual singer out of the picture allows epic to preserve a ‘notional equidistance from all audiences’;Footnote 78 by eliding their own presence, bards also emphasize that the song derives directly from the Muses. What is more, any new innovations to the story are added as subtly and discreetly as possible, and are even referred to as if they were already common knowledge.Footnote 79 The effect is immeasurably heightened for being expressed in the special repertoire of epithets, patronymics, and other formulae that make epic ‘special speech’ and, along with type scenes, familiar tropes, and plot points that are encompassed by the notion of epic traditional referentiality.Footnote 80
If parts of this argument draw heavily on the Invocation of the Muses in Iliad 2, this picture of the relationship between bard, Muse, and truth contrasts notably with the relationship to the Muses fashioned in the late archaic poems that, we have seen above, were indebted to this purple passage of the Iliad. Remarkably, in his ‘Ode to Polycrates’, Ibycus styles his Muses σεσοφισμέναι, ‘practical, technically skilled/clever’ (23).Footnote 81 Questions of truth (or falsity, for that matter) are conspicuously absent from this poem; what matters in the ‘Polycrates Ode’ is precisely that which the poet of the Iliad suggests is inferior to the Muses’ knowledge (cf. Il. 2.485–6): kleos – who gets it, who gives it, and how (46–48).Footnote 82 Simonides’ task in the ‘Plataea Elegy’, meanwhile, is not to transmit otherwise-unknowable information about the mythical past, but to transform the facts of a recent event into an account worthy of its magnitude.Footnote 83 Accordingly, the poet, who asks his Muse to serve as epikouros, a ‘(foreign) auxiliary’ (21), designates her share in the poetic labour as ‘preparing the charming adornment of our song’ (μελί̣φρονα κόσμον ἀοιδῆς | ἡμετέ̣ρης, 23–24).Footnote 84 Both poets allude to Iliad 2 to draw pointed contrasts that highlight the distinctiveness of their own themes, goals, and modes of expression from the Homeric predecessor whom they glorify at the same moment as they depart from him.Footnote 85 Similarly, on the reconstruction of the texts currently favoured, in Paean 6 and especially 7b, engagement with Homer becomes a site for Pindar to radically refashion his poetic persona.Footnote 86 The Invocation of the Muses in Iliad 2 seems to have offered later poets a powerful site for expressing claims about their social function and status as poets, articulating their aesthetic and epistemological positions, and crafting their own poetic identities.
This perspective accords with a popular view concerning Pindar’s epinicians. As in the case of praising a living patron, or valorizing in song a recent battle of great importance, celebrating a victor and his recent victory would seem to require no recourse to an apparatus of truth-telling – the fact of the victory is self-evident, the accuracy of what is being reported for celebration hardly in question. Even when he recounts myths, however, nowhere in the large corpus of his surviving epinicians does Pindar claim recourse to the Muses to vouchsafe the veracity of the account he provides.Footnote 87 Rather, not dissimilar to what we have seen Ibycus and Simonides do, Pindar appeals to them on matters concerning the beauty and propriety of his songs.Footnote 88 The late archaic Muses of Ibycus, Simonides, and Pindar’s epinicians cut rather a different set of figures from their epic sisters, more honey-voiced technicians or arbiters of propriety than guarantors of truth; their aegis bears the sign of poetic craft and social decorum, not epistemological absolutism.
2.3.1 Diachronic Change or Generic Difference?
What does this imply for the epistemological milieu within which Parmenides would have been composing his verse? Answering this question depends in part on whether we see the differences between Iliad 2 and subsequent reworkings of it as the result of being products of different eras or of different genres.
The former case has found many advocates. It is easy to set the differences between Homer, and Ibycus, Simonides, and Pindar’s epinicians against the backdrop of the enormous ‘revolution in wisdom’ that took place during the archaic period, largely as a result of, and in turn partly as a cause of, the many different features cited in the opening paragraphs of this chapter and this section, respectively.Footnote 89 Particularly pertinent would be the question of writing discussed above, whose effects we may already have observed in the discussion of Pindar’s Paean 6 and 7b.Footnote 90 Thus ‘both Pindar and Hecataeus … faced with multiple and contradictory versions [of myths] … acknowledge the impossibility of believing everything the tradition has handed down … Pindar argues for his modifications, while Hecataeus expects the reader to share his understanding of what is likely’.Footnote 91 On this view, Pindar ‘cannot use the Muse to support the truth of his claims, because poetry has already made claims that he wishes to reject’.Footnote 92 That is to say, in the world of late archaic poetry, ‘[t]he Muses do not bear witness or take an oath. The poet must stand by his own words.’Footnote 93
Not long after Ruth Scodel, an expert on archaic poetry, concluded her study of Pindar’s epinicians with the remarks quoted above, a more philosophically oriented scholar could cite the paeans of the same poet to argue for quite a different story of epistemological change in the mid- to late archaic period; thus Herbert Granger claims that ‘Pindar never gives up his reliance on the Muses for truths that are difficult to get at’.Footnote 94 The incompleteness of our evidence does not allow us to determine whether we should best understand a possible contrast between the Muse of Pindar’s epinicians and those of his paeans as a negative statement about the nature of the epinician – that, like the Muse of elegy,Footnote 95 the epinician Muse is not there to be a conduit of truth – or a positive statement about the (Pindaric) paean, or perhaps both. With respect to Paean 6 and 7b, at any rate, it is hard to imagine that the holy nature of the performance setting and the poetic genre are not important. The speaker of Paean 6 begins by appealing, by Zeus, to ‘Golden Pytho, famed for seers’ (1–2), to welcome him, ‘a prophatas of the Pierians, famed in song’ (5–6) in the sacred time (5) of the Delphic theoxenia (cf. lines 60–61);Footnote 96 this is not the occasion to entertain questions of fictionality, or lying Muses, or anything but the most sombre, most ardent commitment to the truth.Footnote 97 One can see why an allusion to the most epistemically aspirational portion of all epic would be valuable.
Even so, the dynamic described by Scodel does not seem to be ameliorated. In fact, the contrary seems to be true – local legends surrounding the origins of the festival apparently create a conflict with the cyclic (i.e. ‘Homeric’) account, and it is precisely this which appears to precipitate Pindar’s appeal to the Muses in the first placeFootnote 98 – one needs to undertake major strategic manoeuvres if one is to convince the audience to trust an account that contravenes Homer’s. Even in this unusually sacred context, however, the best one can do is be persuaded by the Muses and, having been persuaded, persuade other men who, for their part, display (or prove?) their wisdom by being persuaded in turn. A similar dynamic appears to be in play in Paean 7b. There, the best the speaker can hope for from the Muses is a ‘resource’ or ‘facility’ to ‘seek the deep path of wisdom’ (18–20) – a far cry from the direct transmission of knowledge depicted in Iliad 2. The stakes of the matter are brought to the fore clearly in line 42: before introducing two alternative stories concerning the origins of Delos that are hard to reconcile, the speaker of the poemFootnote 99 asks: τί πείσομα[ι]; (‘what will I believe?’).Footnote 100 In the end, invoking the Muses cannot resolve the problem of impossibly accreted accounts (some of them in the authoritative name of Homer) or of incompatibilities between local and Panhellenic traditions; all it can do, especially when bolstered by the holiness of time, place, and rite, is endow with a special gravitas the ethical criteria or political motivations that have shaped the poet’s account.Footnote 101 On this view, that is, the Muses are a strategy for coping with poetic belatedness and the narrative overdetermination that would be one of its primary symptoms; and, as the question at Paean 7b.42 emphasizes – ‘what will I believe?’ – it is a strategy with clear limits.
If anything, then, the examples of Paeans 6 and 7b seem to reveal precisely the limitations of the poet’s recourse to the Muses as guarantors of truth, even in a setting where getting the story right would be a matter of the utmost significance. Even in a poetic genre of direct appeal to a divinity at that divinity’s holy festival, truth is not transmitted directly from the all-knowing Muse but, rather, in the face of multiple and contradictory accounts and with no means to discover it (βροτοῖσιν δ’ ἀμάχανο[ν εὑ]ρέμεν), wise men must be persuaded, that they may in turn persuade others. Whatever μαχανία (Paean 7b.18, cf. Paean 6.53) one manages to get from the Muses, and however one understands this term,Footnote 102 the relationship between man and Muse is plainly far more mediated and circuitous than in Iliad 2.
More challenging to a strictly diachronic account, according to which a ‘poetics of truth’ was ‘superseded’ by a poetics of some other kind, may be the Homeric Hymns, and especially the Hymn to Apollo.Footnote 103 The dating of this poem is of course contested, though it is notable that three heavyweights of twentieth-century classical scholarship should converge on an account that would see portions of the Hymn to Apollo dated to Parmenides’ lifetime, or merely a handful of years before his birth.Footnote 104 As with Pindar’s Paean 6 and Delphi, if one envisions a performance in 523/22 on Delos, are we really to expect that a poem dedicated to the god at a grand festival celebrating him on his own holy isle is best understood within the frame of a ‘poetics of fiction’? This is a doubtful proposition.Footnote 105 However clearly self-aware the poem is, and however cleverly the poet constructs, or fabricates, his own identity, in the end this is serious stuff; one can only assume its story was proposed, and intended to be received, as fact.Footnote 106
By the same token, the dynamics of divine interaction and poetic identity in the Homeric Hymns differ fundamentally from those in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric Hymns begin with the speaker’s ‘I’ and close with a farewell to the divinity in the second person, thus ‘differentiat[ing] the hymn from epic recitation where the Muse is asked to sing and the speaker appears to submerge or meld his own voice with hers’.Footnote 107 A hymn’s second-person parting salutation to the divinity hymned contrasts notably with the naming of the god in the third person in the standard opening of the hymns;Footnote 108 over the course of a hymn itself, that is to say, the gap between human and divine has been bridged, the bard having ‘somehow precipitated an epiphany of the god’ in and through the very act of singing.Footnote 109 Once again, attention to genre is critical. Where Paean 6 and the Hymn to Apollo both address the same god at a sacred festival hosted at one of his major hubs of worship, the dactylic hexameter of the hymn goes hand in hand with a far more immediate relationship not only to the divinity, but to truth; the epistemic complexity we find in Paean 6.50–58 and Paean 7b.15–20 only underscores the immediacy of access presumed – or indeed effected – by the hymn.Footnote 110 However epistemically constrained a late archaic composer of paeans or epinicians might have been, a poet roughly contemporary with Parmenides could nevertheless still claim the kind of access to divinity presupposed by a poetics of truth – but only in the specific parameters of the hexameter Homeric hymn.
There is one final consideration to take into account before moving on to Parmenides. If a diachronic story about a ‘poetics of truth’ giving way to a ‘poetics of fiction’ has come under fire on the grounds that (in certain genres) a ‘poetics of truth’ persisted into the late archaic era, so, too, critics have challenged this paradigm from the other direction. As Stephen Halliwell has argued, to the extent that we can discern a Homeric poetics, it contains more than just truth.Footnote 111 No doubt Halliwell is correct to insist that even as far back as Homer we should see a more complicated dialectic between a ‘poetics of truth’ and an understanding of poetry as ‘a powerfully transformative agency which carries hearers … outside of themselves’;Footnote 112 indeed his arguments on this score provide an important corrective to the view that the Homeric Muses are only there to guarantee the truth of the bard’s story. That is not to say, however, that they cannot do both. Acknowledging the power of the Homeric Muses to ‘transmut[e] even the extremes of human unhappiness into an experience of intense beauty worthy of immortal minds’ need not necessarily imply that the old position – that ‘Homeric epic predicates of itself a mode of truth-telling which amounts to a kind of historical veracity, the full and accurate relating of a heroic past in songs performed by human bards but informed by the divine knowledge of the Muses’ – is in fact ‘far less secure than it is often taken be’.Footnote 113 This is a point we shall take up in the next section.
2.4 Parmenidean Strategies: A Culmination
We are now in a position to tie the three threads of the above sections together. As we saw in Section 2.1, in Hesiod’s epistemic framework, truth (because divinely disclosed) can come only as the result of an epistemically significant interaction with the divine; but, owing to the nature of their own limitations, mortals cannot be certain of the truth-value of the information they receive from this divinity. Xenophanes then flatly denies the possibility of any unmediated disclosure from divinity, and forcefully underscores the inability of mortals to know the truth, as opposed to merely believing the claims at which they arrive in the course of their inquiries. Meeting the challenge set down by Xenophanes thus involves, first, effecting an encounter with a Muse-like divinity, that she may disclose truth, and, second, finding a way to abolish any doubt as to whether what has been disclosed actually is the truth.
What resources would Parmenides have had at his disposal to meet these two challenges? In Section 2.3 (‘Poetics and Epistemology’) we examined the possibility that there was a bardic ideal that, couched in rhetorics of traditionality, universality, and indifference, operated according to a poetics of truth. What might this have meant in Parmenides’ time? We saw that Halliwell seemed to question whether there was any such ideal at all. Whether critics today accept this is an open question – but, crucially, that is a separate matter from whether late archaic poets and thinkers would have done so. In essaying an answer to this second question, one may observe that the analyses of Halliwell and Finkelberg suggest that much of one’s view of Homeric poetics depends on how much prominence one gives the Invocation of the Muses in Iliad 2, which provides the strongest evidence for the position Halliwell finds less secure than is assumed. Though she examines a number of episodes with metapoetic significance, Finkelberg (as is not uncommon in modern discussions of Homeric poetics)Footnote 114 invests Il. 2.484–93 with programmatic significance, citing it in full at two pivotal moments in her argument.Footnote 115 Halliwell, by contrast, begins his analysis with the opening lines of the Iliad, and relegates the Invocation of the Muses in Iliad 2 to a footnote.Footnote 116
The claim need not be that one position is correct and the other mistaken with respect to Homeric poetics itself. Rather, what matters, I suggest, appears to be which of the Homeric invocations to the Muses or other metapoetic moments one makes exemplary in forming one’s opinion of Homeric poetics; make Il. 2.484–93 your programmatic example, and it is unsurprising if you end up with a poetics of truth (and perhaps it would even be surprising if you did not).
If this is so, there would seem to be important implications for assessing how late archaic poets viewed Homer. Here the discussion in Section 2.2 (‘Archaic Receptions of Homer’) can help provide us with an answer. The recurring interest in Iliad 2’s Invocation of the Muses we have observed suggests that the answer to the question ‘Is the “poetics of truth” position less secure than thought?’ must, for the late archaic period, be at least a qualified ‘no’. The qualifications are important. There may indeed be gaps between Homeric theory and practice,Footnote 117 and whether the original audiences of Homer deemed all the poetry they heard to be truthful is a separate question. As ever, the patchiness of the evidence we do have, both in terms of the scarcity of poems that remain, and of the fragmentary state of the papyri we are lucky enough to possess, means that any conclusions we reach about them must be tentative. This does not mean, however, that we cannot make good use of the evidence we have. And what we appear to find, particularly in Ibycus’ ‘Polycrates Ode’ and Simonides’ ‘Plataea Elegy’, suggests that these archaic poets did in fact attribute a poetics of truth to Homer, even if – or perhaps precisely because – they wished to forge different generic and poetic paths. As Pindar’s reworkings of Iliad 2 in his Paeans appear to indicate, however, the possibility of realizing this ideal in full in one’s own poetry was by this time severely constrained, if not entirely foreclosed. Finally, we have seen that roughly contemporary with Parmenides were at least a few poets who maintained an implicit belief in the power of poetry to effect a more direct, less mediated relationship with the divine: the poets behind the Homeric Hymns, composed in a version of the dactylic hexameter Kunstsprache.
With this evidence in mind, here is the view of Parmenides’ task that I propose. Parmenides, product of the late archaic era, inherited an epistemological framework articulated by Hesiod and further developed by Xenophanes. Alongside this Hesiodic framework there was also an ideal, however inaccessible by this date, of a bardic poetics of truth. Constrained by the Hesiodic-Xenophanean framework but with the resources of the second tradition at his disposal, Parmenides’ aim was to reinstall (or even, perhaps, properly to install for the first time) a maximalist epistemological position and stake a credible claim to an iron-clad epic poetics of truth.Footnote 118
2.4.1 Contact with the Divine: Reinstalling the Muse
Parmenides’ proem represents a multipronged strategy designed to fulfil this aim.Footnote 119 The first task is to reinitiate contact with the divine, in order that an epistemically significant interaction with this divinity might occur. Hesiod’s Muses descended to earth to ambush Hesiod on his own turf. Perhaps this was the first sign of trouble for the poetics of truth – the divine truth-tellers lower themselves to the domain of mortals, ‘mere bellies’ though they are (cf. Th. 26). Not so with Parmenides, who, as we have seen, works overtime to locate his encounter with the divine as far as possible from the world of men, ‘far from the beaten track of men’ (ἀπ’ ἀνθρώπων ἐκτὸς πάτου ἐστίν, Fr. 1.27). The Homeric Hymns offered a strategy for making not the epic past but rather the divine present; through the hymn itself, the poet would effect an epiphany. But the hymns do so by summoning the gods into the world of men. Parmenides does one better: his proem does not appeal to the divine to be present in the world of mortals, but transports the human kouros to the extraordinary world of the divine.Footnote 120 Scholars have debated whether the proem depicts a katabasis or an anabasis.Footnote 121 As usual with Parmenides, there are reasons to think that the ambiguities are intentional and beneficial.Footnote 122 One proposal that has gained favour recently sheds light on the essence of what the journey in the proem accomplishes; namely, that it is best understood as an apobasis: a journey that goes not necessarily ‘up nor down, but away from and beyond appearances and the world of the senses’.Footnote 123 The proem thus dramatizes a journey to an Elsewhere, a literally transcendental ‘Beyond’ that can serve as the right place for divine disclosure to occur.
2.4.2 Whose Muse?
A journey to what kind of divinity? Scholars have long debated the identity of the goddess.Footnote 124 Again, one strongly suspects that Parmenides’ ambiguity is strategic.Footnote 125 Functionally, however, the goddess plays precisely the same role in Parmenides’ poem as the Muses do for the poet. That Parmenides’ goddess plays a role functionally similar to an epic Muse is not a new idea.Footnote 126 But, in contrast to most earlier forms of this claim, I think we should see Parmenides’ goddess as much closer in kin, not to Hesiod’s cunning Heliconides, but rather, in light of the above discussion, to the Homeric underwriters of an absolute and incontestable epistemological guarantee to a mortal who would otherwise be constrained by crippling epistemic limitations.Footnote 127
Consider the following comparison. Scholars have from time to time remarked on the similarities between Th. 27–28 and Parmenides’ Fragment 1.29–30.Footnote 128 Immediately preceding Fr. 1.29–30, the goddess has graciously received the kouros, and after a short preamble observing that the journey was ratified by Themis and Dike, informs him that ‘it is right that you should learn all things’ (χρεὼ δέ σε πάντα πυθέσθαι, Fr. 1.28). This is elaborated to mean (Fr. 1.29–30):
The Hesiodic passage, which is indeed similar in important ways, is worth repeating (Th. 27–28):
Finally, consider again the Invocation of the Muses in Il. 2.485–86:
Which of these earlier engagements with the epic Muses do Parmenides’ lines more closely resemble? Tor’s discussion is again instructive, though this time because it embodies the scholarly consensus on the answer to this question. In his discussion of these lines, he observes that ‘like Hesiod, and unlike Homer who remains more in the background, Parmenides makes central the figure of the mortal agent who is identified with the poetic voice’.Footnote 130 But this is mistaken in two ways: Tor’s dismissal of Homer is unjustified, and it is in fact Homer, and not Hesiod, who provides tighter parallels in several important respects.Footnote 131
In fact, as the dichotomy ἡμεῖς…/ὑμεῖς…θεαί underscores, we find here precisely in Il. 2.485–86 what Tor goes on to claim is missing, on account of which he relegates Homer to the background: namely, ‘a first-person encounter with an all-female divine apparatus’.Footnote 132 As has been suggested, one reason that Iliad 2’s Invocation of the Muses proved such a focal point for the early reception of epic is precisely because it is one of the few places in Homer where the poet/narrator does identify himself in the first person and speaks directly in his own voice (Ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι, Il. 2.484);Footnote 133 and his addressee is none other than ‘an all-female divine apparatus’ (ὑμεῖς … θεαί). Placing Parmenides’ Fr. 1.29–30 alongside Il. 2.484–86 shows that the case for relegating Homer to the background is not a strong one.
In fact, the reverse is true: not only should we not relegate Homer to the background, but proper consideration of all three passages makes clear that we must rather place him even more squarely in the foreground than Hesiod. In Il. 2.485–86, we find a dichotomy between epistemic extremes (ἴστέ τε πάντα … οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν); these are mapped onto an ontological distinction between divine and (by implication) mortal (ὑμεῖς … θεαί ἐστε … ἡμεῖς). In Hesiod, the first dichotomy is transformed from an epistemological to a discursive statement (i.e. from knowledge of the truth to the accurate or specious communication of this knowledge); the distinction between gods and mortals, meanwhile, is no longer expressed.Footnote 134 In Parmenides, as in the Homeric Invocation of the Muse, we find the first dichotomy articulated in epistemic terms once again: the distinction is between true knowledge of reality (ἀληθείης εὐκυκλέος ἀτρεμὲς ἦτορ) and a lack, or defectiveness, of knowledge (δόξας, τῇς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). Likewise, as in Il. 2.485–86, this also coincides with, or is mapped onto, a distinction between divine and mortal; the inferior option is expressly linked to the human (βροτῶν δόξας, Fr. 1.30), while, as Tor himself persuasively shows, the epistemically superior option is intimately linked to the divine.Footnote 135 The only respect in which Parmenides’ account more closely resembles Hesiod’s is that it is his unnamed goddess that announces these dichotomies (χρεὼ δέ σε πάντα πυθέσθαι, Fr. 1.28), as do Hesiod’s Muses (ἴδμεν ψεύδεα … λέγειν … ἴδμεν … ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι, Th. 27–28); in Homer, the narrator speaks in his own voice to appeal to the Muses for the transmission of information (Ἔσπετε νῦν μοι, Il. 2.484).
What we find, then, are unquestionable commonalities across all three passages that make it valuable to consider Parmenides’ lines as being in dialogue with both his primary epic predecessors. All three passages establish an epistemically charged relationship between a mortal narrator, who speaks in the first person, and an epistemically privileged female divinity or divinities. Like Th. 26–28 (but not Il. 2.484–86), Parmenides’ lines issue from the all-female divine apparatus. What Parmenides’ Fr. 1.28–30 and Il. 2.484–86 have in common with each other (and not with Th. 26–28) is much more extensive, however: each (a) articulates a dichotomy between two epistemic extremes; (b) explicitly affiliates the epistemically inferior term with the mortal, and associates the epistemically superior term with the divine (expressly in the case of the Iliad, implicitly in Parmenides’ poem); and (c), grants the mortal, who speaks in the first person, apparently unproblematic access to the privileged divine knowledge of the female divinity/divinities in what follows.
There is in fact another passage of Homer that cements even more firmly the case for bringing Homer from the background to make it the primary intertext for Parmenides; since exploring its connections to Parmenides’ fragments 1.21–8.49 will form much of the remainder of this book, however, I shall only gesture to it here. Comparing Parmenides’ goddess to Hesiod’s Muses, Dolin observes: ‘[t]o replace the specific, well-defined Muses of Hesiod, Parmenides has created an abstract blend of the sun-daughters of Thrinacia and Circe’.Footnote 136 Swap ‘Homer’ for ‘Hesiod’ and emphasize Circe a bit more strongly, and the statement captures the scenario masterfully. One hardly needs the semantic acrobatics of the phrase ‘all-female divine apparatus’ to point out that in Odyssey 12, and especially lines 27–141, a single female divinity with privileged access to knowledge (Circe) provides an urgently important, true, and trustworthy account of reality to her male, mortal charge (Odysseus).Footnote 137 Moreover, as we have also seen above, Odysseus’ speech to Alcinous – and indeed the entire Apologoi as a whole, of which Odyssey 12 forms so memorable a part – appealed to poets and thinkers over millennia in part for the very reason that ‘the figure of the mortal agent is identified with the poetic voice’.Footnote 138
2.4.3 Crossroads
There is another major advantage to seeing Parmenides’ goddess as resembling not Hesiod’s cunning Heliconides but rather a brilliantly crafted fusion of Homer’s trustworthy Muses and Circe. Recall point (iii) from Section 2.1 above, namely, that mortals have no way of knowing whether the accounts they get from the Muses are true or not. As Th. 27–28 makes clear (especially within the context of Hesiod’s conception of man and god, and male and female), mortals cannot ever really know what information they receive from divinity is the truth, and what is merely lies. Reading Parmenides against Homer’s Invocation of the Muses rather than Th. 27–28 reveals one of his most extraordinary strategies for addressing this issue. All three pairs of lines establish at least one fundamental dichotomy. The (mortal) speaker of the Iliad declares an essential distinction between absolute divine knowledge (ὑμεῖς … θεαί ἐστε, ἴστέ τε πάντα) and abject human ignorance (ἡμεῖς … οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν). Hesiod’s Muses cruelly exploit this ignorance by taking the superior information they can offer (ἴδμεν … ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι) and a specious lookalike (ἴδμεν ψεύδεα … λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα) and mixing them up, polluting with lies like mud in the water of the Olympian spring the Muse-derived bardic poetics of truth. Here, however, Parmenides deploys an ingenious rhetorical stratagem: by rigorously filtering out the truthful distillate (in the ‘Route to Truth’), its epistemic purity personally guaranteed by the divine, and leaving the epistemic sludge (Doxa) to stand on its own, Parmenides’ Muse-like goddess sanitizes epic discourse once more.Footnote 139 She can begin her task of abrogating the Heliconian mischief of Th. 27–28 and undoing its epistemological damage by restoring the Olympian clarity of the interlinked dichotomies of Il. 2.485–86; these neatly differentiate between high and low epistemic positions and map them onto two separate ontological domains, the divine and the human, while giving the human (who is also the first-person narrator) otherwise-unobtainable access to the divine perspective.
In fact, this is only the first move of a multistep programme that Parmenides’ (Homeric-) Muse-like goddess undertakes to smelt out the epistemic alloy Parmenides inherits from Hesiod’s mischievous Muses and separate the pure ore of truth (ἀληθείης εὐκυκλέοςFootnote 140 ἀτρεμὲς ἦτορ) from doxastic slag (βροτῶν δόξας, τῇς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). Unlike Hesiod’s Muses, who simply tell Hesiod what they wish and leave it for him to decide what is true and what merely resembles the truth, when she provides the kouros her account of reality, Parmenides’ goddess makes a point of ring-fencing trustworthy from untrustworthy discourse with a cordon sanitaire at Fragment 8.50–52 (cf. esp. Fr. 8.50: ‘here I end my pistis logos’). What is more, she also has her master manoeuvre: the hodos. Or rather, hodoi: for she will distribute the two stuffs, one pure and trustworthy, the other bankrupt or mixed (depending on how one interprets their relationship to fragments 6 and 7, and their relationship in turn to Doxa) to two different paths, the one no longer able to contaminate the other or confuse mortals as to its status. As we shall explore at length in chapters 4 and 5, the image of the forked hodos offers Parmenides’ goddess an extraordinary point of conceptual leverage to prise off the doxastic from the true.
2.4.4 Narrators and Voices
As we saw, this analysis does, however, bring to the fore one important distinction between Il. 2.484–86 and what follows it, and Parmenides’ Fragment 1.29–30 and what follows it. As in Theogony 27–28, the goddess(es) speak in her (or their) own voice, while in Il. 2.484 and following all we hear is the appeal of the first-person mortal narrator.Footnote 141 This only reaffirms the passage’s resemblance to Homer, however – though not necessarily with just Iliad 2. In the Theogony, all that we hear from the goddesses themselves is their taunt to the first-person narrator, who resumes in his own voice immediately after and in the remainder of what follows. Here again, Odysseus’ conversation with Circe at Od. 12.27–141 provides a much better parallel.
Even more strikingly, we see yet another benefit of reading Parmenides’ against the backdrop of Odyssey 12, a comparison that helps us see more clearly one of Parmenides’ most dazzling manoeuvres for establishing the trustworthiness of his account, and banishing any uncertainty about its veracity. Πολλὰ ψεύδονται ἀοιδοί, Solon is said to have warned: ‘the poets tell many lies’ (25 G.-P. = 29 W2).Footnote 142 And even if a poet can somehow be trusted not to lie, the foregoing discussion of Pindar hints at another major problem. We saw above the great gulf between the direct transmission from Muses to man in Il. 2.484–93 and the relationship to the Muses that Pindar depicts in Pae. 6.50–58 and Pae. 7b.15–20. In a best-case scenario, epistemically speaking, Pindar was to be given μαχανία by the Muses (Pae. 7b.17, cf. Pae. 6.53), but not even this would prevent him from confronting fundamental aporiai (cf. Pae. 7b.42–52) which he lacks the resources to surmount beyond what his own moral compass and sense of credibility can provide. The very asking of the question τί πείσομαι; (Pae. 7b.42) is deeply telling. Can one imagine the epic bard asking a similar question as he contemplates a dubious account of, say, the effects of Achilles’ wrath on the Trojan War? Even were a poet’s commitment not to lie were known to be absolute, how could an audience know that he or she, having to ask τί πείσομαι;, really had unmediated access to the truth?
The precise nature of this complex of problems becomes clear when one considers another moment in Paean 6, where the speaker characterizes himself as a προφάτας of the Muse (Pae. 6.6), and, likewise, when he (or perhaps a character?) declares μαντεύεο, Μοῖσα, προφατεύσω δ’ ἐγώ (Fr. 150 Maehler).Footnote 143 Both passages have provoked a number of interpretations, but even on the most epistemically optimistic reading of these fragmentary texts, such a relationship between poet and Muse would be of little use to someone trying to respond to the challenge set down by Xenophanes in his Fr. 18, which clearly includes a criticism of diviners.Footnote 144 This optimistic reading of Pae. 6.6 and Fr. 150 posits an analogy between, for example, the Delphic oracle and someone who interprets the meaning of the oracle, and the Muses and Pindar; just as the first ‘are never false … and only their interpretations may be true or false’, so the Muse never tells the poets anything false, but the poets sometimes misinterpret them.Footnote 145 But how does this guarantee the veracity of what poets say? This reading spares the poet from the accusation of lying, but that is not the same as saying he can always be relied upon to render the correct interpretation. More to the point, if Xenophanes rejects the possibility of precisely this kind of unerring interpretative trenchancy on the part of diviners, how could one hope to counter his critique by offering a model of access to the truth analogous to the very same one he questions?
By contrast, the more ‘humble’ reading of Pae. 6.6 and Fr. 150 has it that Pindar is merely the ‘spokesman’ or, quite literally, the mouthpiece of the Muses (viz. ‘one who speaks on behalf of others’) just as the ‘Delphic priests are the spokesman of the Pythia’.Footnote 146 Again, however, one must ask how such a relationship between poet and Muse could be of value to someone attempting to respond to Xenophanes’ scepticism. The problems come clearly into view in what remains of the body of the paean. As we saw, Pindar there contradicts the Odyssey in his own telling of the story of Neoptolemus; the implication is that the Pindaric speaker, not Homer, is the true ‘spokesman of the Muses’.Footnote 147 But what is to stop another poet from coming along in the future and playing the same game with Pindar’s Paean 6? And how does one know which mortal poet is the true spokesman of the Muses, and which merely a Homeric pretender? If Parmenides’ goal is to eradicate completely any confusion, uncertainty, or ambiguity surrounding the epistemic status of his message, being a Pindaric προφάτας of the Muse will not suffice, then, no matter how one interprets the phrase. We are no further than we were in Section 2.3.
Whether Pindar is to be understood as the interpreter of the Muse or her mouthpiece, Parmenides can go one better. His Muse needs no προφάτας: she speaks for herself, directly. We see here what is perhaps the most important upshot of Parmenides’ engagement with a portion of the Apologoi (viz. Od. 12.27–141), the one extended portion of epic narrated in the first person, which thus sits somewhere between the style of character speech and narration, whose speaker occupies a role between ‘storyteller and poet’, speaker of epos and purveyor of aidos.Footnote 148 Choosing the portion of the Odyssey that is presented by a (mortal) internal narrator, Odysseus, who narrates at length his interactions with, inter alios, figures with special access to knowledge (such as the divinity Circe or the seer Tiresias), allows Parmenides’ kouros to speak in the first-person ‘I’, as Odysseus does, while presenting his divinity in her own words, just as Circe and her epistemically privileged ilk are presented in the Odyssey. The result is hard truth presented in direct speech: Parmenides offers us alētheia straight from the source. A figure of privileged access to knowledge directly akin to the Muses speaks not through the poet as she might through an epic bard, in his voice and in his words: instead, the privileged source of knowledge is itself directly quoted by the speaker, and thus presented, immediately and unmediatedly, to the audience of the poem. The Muse no longer speaks through the mouth of the poet; rather, through an astonishing narratological sleight of hand, the Muse speaks for herself. By making Circe’s speech to Odysseus in Odyssey 12 the key intertext that he reworks, that is, Parmenides goes beyond the epistemic status implicitly asserted for the remainder of the Iliad by the Invocation of the Muses. His Muse needs no mouthpiece to give voice to the truth.
2.4.5 Argument
The goddess still has a final trump card to play, however. Her coup de grâce, an absolute guarantee rebutting Xenophanes and abolishing once and for all any uncertainty about the truth status of his claims, able to withstand the most gruelling and rigorous elenchus (as he puts it in Fr. 7.5) is an extended deductive argument, beginning from a point that all must accept.Footnote 149 As we shall see in the following chapters, she begins from a point that must be accepted (for who could reject it? cf. Parm. Fr. 2.7–8); moves on the rut road of argument (and who could swerve from it?); and ends at her fixed, final, ultimate, inevitable destination. Parmenides offers a better criterion for persuasion than the ethical canon of Pindar: iron-clad argument. We might be tempted to see here a Parmenidean version of the classic Homeric idea of ‘double motivation’.Footnote 150 On the one hand, the extended deductive argument is the proper complement of the unmediated divine disclosure that the kouros – and all of us, future listeners and readers – are party to. On the other, it comes straight from the mouth of the goddess, the very font of truth incarnate. Of late archaic poetry, Scodel wrote, ‘[t]he Muses do not bear witness or take an oath. The poet must stand by his own words’ (which could also be applied to early prose writers, like Hecataeus). In Parmenides’ poem, thanks to his spectacular mythifying (if not versifying) and his breathtaking narratological pas de deux, the poet does not need to bear witness or take an oath – the Muse stands by her own words. How could those words fail to persuade, beginning from a point all must accept and moving by way of extended deductive arguments to an inevitable conclusion (delineating, that is, the key outline of a demonstration)?
Incidentally, it bears emphasizing that the interpretation I have sketched out here is entirely compatible – or at least not a priori incompatible – with readings of Parmenides’ poem that focus on possible links with ritual or initiatory practices, language, or cults that may have been prevalent in Parmenides’ Elea.Footnote 151 Here we can benefit from Tor’s explosion of the dichotomy between reasoning and revelation,Footnote 152 and also from, for example, Ranzato’s use of Gernet’s notion of the ‘polysemy of myth’.Footnote 153 The benefit of these interpretative approaches becomes clear when comparing the conception of Parmenides’ goddess for which I advocate here with the views of, for example, Herbert Granger. As Granger puts it:
Parmenides is endeavoring to reshape the age-old practice of the appeal to a divine Muse into that which he takes to be the real value that lies behind the mythology of the Muse and of the whole tradition of divine revelation. The proem helps prepare us for the appreciation of the goddess as a persona who is symbolic of non-empirically based reason, and Parmenides is engaged in the demythologization of the Muse into a priori reason, the exercise of which yields truths without the aid of evidence provided by our perception.Footnote 154
Some similarities with the arguments made here will be obvious; Parmenides’ goddess is indeed a rhetorical device with the full weight of Homeric authority behind her. But she need not only be this. We may therefore part ways with Granger on two fundamental points. First, in keeping with Ranzato, Miller, and others, we should embrace the notion of a Parmenidean poetic discourse that allows for the goddess to occupy more than one role in more than one network of mythical or ritual associations at the same time; this interpretative flexibility would exemplify one kind of major pay-off that comes from reading Parmenides’ poem as a poem. Second, liberated from the need to see a tension between the goddess’s divinely disclosing a revelatory truth or making an a priori extended deductive argument, we need not be compelled to claim that Parmenides demythologizes anything. Instead, rather than seeing him as stripping old symbols of their meaning, we should see in Parmenides a virtuoso myth-maker who marshals together meaning-making symbols from different discourses and, activating their individual powers at different points and in different ways, harnesses each of these within one supercharged but unified, coherent whole. Parmenides’ goddess need not be reducible to any single ‘real’ value, but can have many different faces that she reveals at different times, or even at the same time depending on where one stands. So (if the historical Parmenides did indeed know the cults he is sometimes claimed to have known, or even if the discourse of his community was strongly affected by them) she can be like Demeter, Persephone, or Mnemosyne, depending on one’s preferred ritual context;Footnote 155 so she can also be like a Homeric Muse guaranteeing the absolute truth of the poem; so she can also, as we will discuss in chapters 5 and 6, be like Circe in Odyssey 12; and, provided one can make the cases for historical legitimacy and poetic relevancy properly, so can she also, perhaps, be like other characters as well. Parmenides loses nothing on this view except his status as a proto-analytic philosopher, an Enlightenment voice crying out in the archaic wilderness. And what he gains is the power of the poet, a thinker and user of language who taps the power of linguistic polysemy and polyvalence, socially and religiously charged imagery, pre-existing poetic traditions and the cultural institutions of his time and channels them all to the same end.
2.4.6 Dactylic Hexameter
Finally, we may also observe that the foregoing discussion also bears on Parmenides’ use of verse. As noted above, one consequence of the overwhelming tendency of scholars to read Parmenides as a philosopher rather than a poet – or, to make a slightly different point, of the tendency of scholars of ancient philosophy, but not of ancient poetry, to read Parmenides – has been to make it peculiar, at best, and a ‘grievous scandal’, at worst, for him to have composed in verse.Footnote 156 It is here that we see clearly how placing Parmenides within a chronology that does not begin with the Milesians, and includes or abuts not only Xenophanes, Heraclitus, or Zeno, but also the likes of Ibycus, Simonides, Pindar, and the Hymn to Apollo, grants us access to a new face of the kaleidoscope of his poem.
What has relocating Parmenides in the context of late archaic poetry added to this topic? Three insights. First, we see even more clearly how inappropriate the Muse-less form of prose would have been for his endeavours.Footnote 157 If overcoming the obstacles established by Xenophanes was of major importance for Parmenides’ project, and if this in turn required effecting an encounter with the divine, what possible use could prose, the medium of the new men of Ionian empiricism, have been? From this perspective, it would have been no more appropriate for Parmenides to have written in prose, one might think, than for a modern-day logician to undertake a proof in sonnet form.
But, second, and on the one hand, relocating Parmenides in the context of late archaic poetry should also make his choice of dactylic hexameter seem even more radical than has usually been acknowledged. The critics who have denigrated Parmenides’ poetic abilities universally wish he had opted for prose instead. Rowett is right to suggest that verse was the default form for the elevated and authoritative kind of speech act undertaken by Parmenides.Footnote 158 However, as the discussion above has also made clear, if by the late archaic period verse was still the authoritative medium in which to convey important ideas of some length, the ‘special speech’ of dactylic hexameter does not seem to have been. As we touched on above in our discussion of Od. 9.2–11 and later elegiac congeners, elegy seems to have been far and away the preferred medium for examining or announcing vitally important truths during Parmenides’ time.Footnote 159 It is true, as Sider points out, that Xenophanes, who wrote long compositions in elegy, ‘reserves his more scientific and philosophic writings for hexameters’.Footnote 160 These are all extremely short, however; whereas his elegiac fragments 1 and 2 clock in at twenty-four and twenty-two lines, respectively, his longest surviving hexameter composition is four lines (Fr. 34), and it does not seem that this was part of a longer continuous treatise.Footnote 161 By Parmenides’ time, the great boom in hexameter poetry represented not only by the Iliad and Odyssey but also, inter alia, the Cyclic Epics, the Hymn to Aphrodite and the Hymn to Demeter, and other poems such as the Catalogue of Women and the Shield of Heracles, seems to have slowed to a trickle; this is often taken to go hand in hand with the development of new modes of poetic expression to treat the topics of epic myth, often while making liberal use of epic diction, such as Stesichorean choral lyric.Footnote 162 Those who did continue to use dactylic hexameter for compositions of more than just a few lines often seem to have been associated with special guilds of rhapsodes particularly comfortable dealing with the artificial language of epic.Footnote 163
In short, we should entertain the possibility that the gap between the end of the oral hexameter tradition and Parmenides is a chasm more expansive than is often acknowledged; to speak the ‘special speech’ of epic was neither obvious, nor, I suggest, was it easily accomplished in a socially or intellectually persuasive way. That a thinker should have used verse to express his urgently important ideas in the late archaic period should come as a surprise to no one; that he should have done so in dactylic hexameter – and at such length, and at this late moment in the archaic period – appears bold. Just as for Pindar it was apparently quite a radical act to depart from the authority of the ‘well-trodden track’ of Homer when it came to matters of poetic content, so for Parmenides – who, to the best of our knowledge, was not a member of any kind of rhapsodic guild or the like – to return to the authority of Homer’s dactylic hexameters in choosing the poetic form in which to compose a poem of more than 160 lines (and perhaps up to around 500 or 600 lines)Footnote 164 was also, so it would seem, quite radical.Footnote 165
Third, and on the other hand, the foregoing discussion should also make dactylic hexameter seem even more desirable for Parmenides’ purposes in ways that extend beyond what the critics mentioned above have already proposed.Footnote 166 The discussion of Ibycus, Simonides, Pindar’s Paean 6 and 7b, and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo make clear how much the medium dactylic hexameter had to offer a thinker labouring to respond to Xenophanes’ challenge. If in Simonides’ day, the bard of the Iliad could be said to have ‘received the whole truth [πᾶσαν ἀληθείην]’ from the Muses, what could be more useful to Parmenides’ purposes than to assimilate himself to that tradition and claim that same possibility for himself? If, for Ibycus, the Muses could ‘embark upon’ what ‘no living mortal man could tell’,Footnote 167 what could be more valuable for Parmenides than to reinitiate contact with their kind? Conversely, if the surest connection to the divine that even so grand and numinous a figure as Pindar could claim (and at the Delphic theoxenia no less!) is μαχανία, and if the most this amounts to is to be persuaded by the Muse (if one is wise) and to persuade other wise men in turn; or to have one’s blindness eased (but how much?) as one seeks out the deep paths of wisdom, we see in the gulf between these positions and the scenario depicted in Il. 2.484–93 just how much Parmenides had to gain from earning access once again to the use of dactylic hexameter. The one genre that managed to maintain direct, immediate contact of a kind with the divine, the Homeric hymn, pointed to a strategy for reanimating the special speech of epic and reactivating the old rhetorics of traditionality, indifference, and universality en route to reclaiming a poetics of truth.
2.5 Conclusion
One of Parmenides’ most urgent aims was to resurrect (or, depending on how much one wishes to concede to Halliwell’s interpretation, properly to install for the first time) a poetics of truth. From the perspective of the late archaic era, at least, Iliad 2’s Invocation of the Muses was seen to set out an ideal of epistemological absolutism. The deep ambiguities inscribed into the foundations of Hesiod’s epistemology (and indeed his entire conception of the cosmos and the place of mortals within it) both expose the tensions that may always have been inherent in the epic tradition of the bards (otherwise, why should a rhetoric of traditionality have been necessary in the first place?), and also articulate the framework that would define subsequent conceptions of epistemology. The other poets of Parmenides’ late archaic era, whether they looked back on the ideal of Iliad 2 with nostalgia or playfully rejected it, seem both to have entertained this ideal and accepted that matters of truth and falsity were, in their time at least, more complex. A revanchist Parmenides set out to revitalize – or realize for the first time – an ideal that may or may not ever have been unambiguously in circulation. His Muse would speak the absolute truth – and, like Circe to Odysseus, she would do so directly, in her own voice.
In crafting a socially and intellectually compelling response to Xenophanes’ challenge, Parmenides was faced with the task of speaking many languages, telling many stories, producing many texts at the same time. Reinstating a poetics of truth, invested with the extraordinary weight of the epic past and its canonical bard (who had received the whole truth from the violet-tressed Muses) was a task that only the most rarefied maker of myths – a poet in the etymological sense – could tackle. In Parmenides’ poem and in his goddess, we can discern a new kind of ‘double motivation’ (double at the least): to dramatize an effective reunion with an all-knowing divinity, and in her own domain, her own proper and carefully guarded site of truth, that a poetics of truth might be (re)instated once and for all; and, to be absolutely certain, through the Doom-ful, Fate-ful, unyielding power of necessity, movement via the path of argument (no turns, no swerves, no other routes permitted) that no voyager on the ‘Route to Truth’ could fail to achieve anything short of full knowledge of the truth. The most elegant versifier to have plied hexameter fields Parmenides may not have been. But the foregoing analysis reveals a poet whose dexterous command of mythical and religious imagery can match even the most brilliant of his near contemporaries. In fact, the case presents perhaps the finest adjunct of all to the Muses’s diademFootnote 168 – not the clear-voiced, honey-tongued Muse of elegy or lyric, but the Muse who speaks an irrefutable truth in her own voice, directly to her audience.
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