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):

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:

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?

1.2.1 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.

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?

2.3.1 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.

2.4.1 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:

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.