The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some fragments of the (philosophic) poetry of
Parmenides, with philosophic commentary. They say about Parmenides:
Parmenides of Elea, active in the earlier part of the 5th c. BCE., authored a difficult metaphysical poem that has earned him a reputation as early Greek philosophy’s most profound and challenging thinker. His philosophical stance has typically been understood as at once extremely paradoxical and yet crucial for the broader development of Greek natural philosophy and metaphysics. He has been seen as a metaphysical monist (of one stripe or another) who so challenged the naïve cosmological theories of his predecessors that his major successors among the Presocratics were all driven to develop more sophisticated physical theories in response to his arguments.
Copyright © 2008 by John Palmer
© Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University
Here are some lines of his poetry:
And the goddess received me kindly, and in her hand she took/ my right hand, and she spoke and addressed me thus:/ “O young man, accompanied by immortal charioteers/ [25] and mares who bear you as you arrive at our abode,/ welcome, since a fate by no means ill sent you ahead to travel/ this way (for surely it is far from the track of humans),/ but Right and Justice did.” (Fr. 1.1-28a)
You must needs learn all things,/ both the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality/ [30] and the notions of mortals, in which there is no genuine conviction./ Nonetheless these things too will you learn, how what they resolved/ had actually to be, all through all pervading. (Fr. 1.28b-32)
Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for thinking:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for it attends upon true reality,/ [5] but the other, that [it] is not and that [it] must not be,/ this, I tell you, is a path wholly without report:/ for neither could you apprehend what is not, for it is not to be accomplished,/ nor could you indicate it. (Fr. 2)
It is necessary to say and to think that What Is is; for it is to be,/ but nothing it is not. These things I bid you ponder./ For I shall begin for you from this first way of inquiry,/ then yet again from that along which mortals who know nothing/ [5] wander two-headed: for haplessness in their/ breasts directs wandering thought. They are borne along/ deaf and blind at once, bedazzled, undiscriminating hordes,/ who have supposed that it is and is not the same/ and not the same; but the path of all these turns back on itself. (Fr. 6, supplementing the lacuna at the end of fr. 6.3 with arxô and taking s’ earlier in the line as an elision of soi, as per Nehamas 1981, 103-5; cf. the similar proposal at Cordero 1984, ch. 3, expanding parts of Cordero 1979.)
[5] … but not ever was it, nor yet will it be, since it is now together entire,/ single, continuous; for what birth will you seek of it?/ How, whence increased? From not being I shall not allow/ you to say or to think: for not to be said and not to be thought/ is it that it is not. And indeed what need could have aroused it/ [10] later rather than before, beginning from nothing, to grow?/ Thus it must either be altogether or not at all./ Nor ever from not being will the force of conviction allow/ something to come to be beyond it: on account of this neither to be born/ nor to die has Justice allowed it, having loosed its bonds,/ [15] but she holds it fast. And the decision about these matter lies in this:/ it is or it is not; but it has in fact been decided, just as is necessary,/ to leave the one unthought and nameless (for no true/ way is it), and <it has been decided> that the one that it is indeed is genuine./ And how could What Is be hereafter? And how might it have been?/ [20] For if it was, it is not, nor if ever it is going to be:/ thus generation is extinguished and destruction unheard of. (fr. 8.5-21)
And unmoved within the limits of great bonds/ it is unbeginning unending, since generation and destruction/ have wandered quite far away, and genuine conviction has expelled them./ And remaining the same, in the same place, and on its own, it rests,/ [30] and thus steadfast right there it remains; for powerful Necessity/ holds it in the bonds of a limit, which encloses it all around,/ wherefore it is right that What Is be not unfulfilled; for it is not lacking: if it were, it would lack everything. (fr. 8.22-5)
But since there is a furthest limit, it is perfected/ from every side, like the bulk of a well-rounded globe,/ from the middle equal every way: for that it be neither any greater/ [45] nor any smaller in this place or in that is necessary;/ for neither is there non-being, which would stop it reaching/ to its like, nor is What Is such that it might be more than What Is/ here and less there. Since it is all inviolate,/ for it is equal to itself from every side, it extends uniformly in limits. (fr. 8.42-9)
You will know the aither’s nature, and in the aither all the/ signs, and the unseen works of the pure torch/ of the brilliant sun, and from whence they came to be,/ and you will learn the wandering works of the round-eyed moon/ [5] and its nature, and you will know too the surrounding heaven,/ both whence it grew and how Necessity directing it bound it/ to furnish the limits of the stars. (Fr. 10)
…how the earth and sun and moon/ and the shared aither and the heavenly milk and Olympos/ outermost and the hot might of the stars began/ to come to be. (Fr. 11)
Copyright © 2008 by John Palmer
© Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University
These are fascinating thoughts at the birth of Greek philosophy, reaching its apex in Socrates, Plato, and, most of all, Aristotle.
