The Fragments of Parmenides (Davidson 1869)

The Eleatic school of Philosophy is mainly represented by four names: Xenophanēs, Parmenidēs, Melissos, and Zeno. Though the first of these is universally regarded as the founder of the school, Parmenidēs is the most important figure in it, the Eleatic par excellence. His father’s name was Pyrrhēs. He himself was a native of Elea or Velia. This city, which was of small importance politically, was founded about B. C. 540 by a colony of Phokæans. It lay on the western shore of Lucania.

The date of Parmenidēs’ birth is uncertain; but we shall hardly be wrong in placing it in the last quarter of the sixth century B. C. Diogenês Laertius says he flourished about the sixty-ninth Olympiad (B. C. 504–501); but this can hardly be true, if any confidence is to be placed in the statements of Plato. In the dialogue entitled Parmenidēs we read: “Antiphon stated on the authority of Pythodoros that Zeno and Parmenidēs once came to the greater Panathenæa, Parmenidēs being at that time quite an old man with grey hair and a handsome and noble countenance, and certainly not over sixty-five-years of age; Zeno about forty years old, tall and elegant, said to have been the favorite of Parmenides. He mentioned also that they put up at the house of Pythodoros in the Kerameikos, outside the city walls, and that Sokratēs and many other persons visited them there, desiring to hear Zeno read his productions, which had then been brought by them for the first time, and that Sokratēs was then a very young man.” In the Sophist, Sokratês is made to say: “I was present when Parmenidēs uttered and discussed words of exceeding beauty, I being then a young man, and he already far advanced in years.” ​Again, in the Theætetos, he says: “For I was personally acquainted with the man, I being very young, and he very old.” Supposing Sokratês, who was born about B. C. 469, to have been fifteen years old when he conversed with Parmenidēs, this would place this meeting in 454 B. C., and the birth of Parmenidēs in 519. This tallies exactly with the statement of Diogenēs that Zeno, who, according to Plato, was twenty-five years younger than Parmenidēs, flourished about the seventy-ninth Olympiad, 454–451 B. C. Mr. Grote’s opinion, which is not much at variance with this, is worth quoting in his own words:

“It will hardly be proper to place the conversation between Parmenidēs and Sokratês—as Mr. Clinton places it, Fast. H. vol. ii. App. c. 21, p. 364—at a time when Sokrates was only fifteen years of age. The ideas which the ancients had about youthful propriety would not permit him to take part in conversation with an eminent philosopher at so early an age as fifteen, when he would not yet be entered on the roll of citizens, or be qualified for the smallest function, military or civil. I cannot but think that Sokratês must have been more than twenty years of age when he thus conversed with Parmenidēs.

“Sokratês was born in 469 (perhaps 468) B. C.; he would therefore be twenty years of age in 449; assuming the visit of Parmenidēs to Athens to have been in 448 B. C, since he was then sixty-five years of age, he would be born in 513 B. C. It is objected that, if this date be admitted, Parmenidēs could not have been a pupil of Xenophanēs: we should thus be compelled to admit, which perhaps is the truth, that he learned the doctrine of Xenophanēs at second-hand.”

Theophrastos informs us that Parmenidēs was a pupil of Anaximander; but this can hardly be true, if as Diogenēs asserts, on the authority of Apollodoros, Anaximander died in the fifty-eighth Olympiad (548–545 B. C), several years before the founding of Elea. That Parmenidēs may have been acquainted with some of the teachings of Anaximander seems not unlikely. The latter had declared the Infinite to be the first principle of all things, a doctrine which it seems to be the intention of Parmenides pointedly to refute and disclaim when he says:

It was currently reported in Aristotle’s time that Parmenidēs was a pupil of Xenophanēs, and we have every reason to believe that he was. We learn also that he was intimate with several Pythagoreans, two of whom, Ameinias and Diochætês, are mentioned. He is said to have admired them greatly, to have adopted to a considerable extent their mode of life, and to have erected a Heroön to the memory of Diochætēs.

​Parmenidēs was no mere dreamer. Like Empedoklēs and others, he took an active part in the public affairs of his native city, and drew up a code of laws, to which the Eleans every year swore to conform. He was the friend of Empedoklēs and Leukippos, and the teacher of Melissos and Zeno. He disseminated his philosophy not only by his writings, but also, as we have seen, by public lectures and discussions. He employed in his discussions the Dialectic method of reasoning which had been invented by Xenophanēs, and was afterwards so much improved and used by Zeno as to be considered his invention. We are not aware that Parmenidēs left any prose writings. Like most of the contemporary philosophers, he committed his teachings to verse and indeed, if we may believe Proklos and Cicero, was not very successful in so doing. The former says his diction was more like prose than poetry, and the latter that his verses were inferior, but the matter of them sometimes pretty forcible; which we can believe.

The only work of Parmenidēs known to the ancients, and probably the only one he ever composed, was the poem entitled On Nature, whereof considerable fragments have come down to us—preserved mainly in the works of Plato, Sextus Empeiricus, Proklos, and Simplicius. The ancients regarded the poem as divided into two parts, the one On Truth or On the Intelligible, the other On Opinion or On the Perceptible. The latter is called by Plutarch a Cosmogony, and not without reason, for in it Parmenidēs seems to have attempted, without denying the existence of the gods, to explain them upon physical principles. In what esteem this poem was held by the ancients we may learn from the writings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as from many later productions. Much that is put into the mouth of Parmenidēs in the Platonic dialogue which bears his name, we must ascribe to Plato himself, or to whoever was the author. This dialogue, which according to Hegel contains “the sublimest dialectic that ever was,” is held by some critics not to be from the pen of Plato.

The following translation is made from the Fragments as they stand in Mullach’s Fragmenta Philosophorum Græcorum, Paris, Didot. Though I have adopted his arrangement, I have not in all cases adopted his readings, which are, in one or two instances, I think, very inconsiderate. I have used every effort to make the translation literal, and I think it will be found to be so. As to my verses, I may plead that, if Parmenidēs was unable to write his Philosophy in good Greek hexameters, I may be excused for not being able to translate them into good English ones. In the notes, I have brought together all the valuable information I have been able to and regarding the different parts of the work of Parmenidēs.

1.  This introduction has generally been looked upon as allegorical. In one sense it is so; at the same time we must not forget that what in its own day was the soberest statement of facts that could be made, frequently appears to succeeding ages as allegorical. Primitive peoples found it far easier to embody new thoughts and feelings in the concrete forms of their mythology, with which they were familiar, than to describe them in abstract terms. If we find Parmenidēs saying that he was borne aloft by horses to the presence of the Goddess who governs all things, we must not forget that our own language is not altogether free from allegory, when we say that he “rose to higher regions of thought.” Parmenidēs did not mean to make an allegory; he simply gave an account of his mental progress in the ordinary mythological dialect of his time, and that, from our point of view, seems allegorical.

2.  If we compare the opening of this with a passage in the fifth book of the Iliad, where Heré and Athené visit Zeus in their chariot, we cannot fail to be struck with the similarity of the two. “And Heré touched the steeds sharply with the whip, and, of their own accord, the gates of the sky, kept by the Horæ, to whom are entrusted the wide sky, and Olympus, to fold back the dense cloud, and to replace it, burst open. And through these they guided their goaded steeds, and found the son of Kronos sitting afar from the other gods on the summit of many-peaked Olympus.” We need not be very anxious to determine precisely what Parmenidēs meant by coursers or by chariot. Imaginations capable of furnishing the sun with a chariot for his daily course might surely be pardoned for giving the soul one, when it ascends into the pure ether of thought, without our supposing that it must represent the appetites or anything else in particular. A chariot was the recognized means of rising aloft, not only among the Greeks but also among the ancient Indians, the Hebrews (witness the story of Elijah), and other nations. That Parmenidēs, when his mind was expanding, and, as it were, grasping the whole Universe in one thought, should have felt that he was coming into the region of the gods, and pictured himself as furnished with their means of locomotion, one can readily believe. If this is once admitted, we need not spend much labor in attempting to interpret minute points about the ​chariot or its axles. Sextus Empeiricus, in whose work Adversus Mathematicos this introduction is for the most part preserved, makes a comment upon it, which we must take for what it is worth. Sextus lived at a time when philosophers were finding allegories in everything ancient; witness his contemporary Porphyry’s Cave of the Nymphs. His views of what Parmenidēs may have thought, and his ideas concerning the imagery likely to have suggested itself to Parmenidēs, can have no authority whatever. He says: “In these lines, Parmenidēs says he is borne by coursers—that is, the irrational impulses and appetites of the soul—along the noble and glorious pathway of a goddess—that is, the path of contemplation based on philosophic reason. For reason, like a guiding deity, conducts to the knowledge of all things. And her daughters go before—namely, the senses. He refers to the ears when he says: ‘It was urged by a couple of wheels well-rounded’ by the wheels (circles), that is, of the ears, through which they receive sound. Intuitions he calls ‘daughters of the Sun,’ who leave the ‘mansions of darkness,’ and move [their veils] toward the light, because without light there would be no use for them. He says he came to Diké or avenging Justice, ‘who keepeth the keys of requital,’ that is, to thought, which has the sure and steadfast comprehensions of things. She, having received him, promises to teach him two things,

that is, the unswerving step of science;

that is, whatever is matter of opinion, as being, for that reason, uncertain. In the end she makes the clear declaration, that the senses are not to be trusted, but only the reason. She says:

From this it is plain that he (Parmenidēs) also, in pronouncing the scientific reason to be the canon of truth in regard to the things that are (in matters of ontology), revolted against the authority of the senses.”

3.  (See note 7.)

4.  The daughters of the Sun, in the mythological account, were Æglé, Lampetié, and Phaëthousa—Radiance, Sheen, and Gleam. The allegory here is very simple. Pindar calls the sun’s ray the “Far-seeing mother of the eyes,” and the sun himself the “Birth-giving father of the sharp rays,” and the “Lord of the fire-breathing steeds.” Preller, in his Griechische Mythologie, says: “From his radiant light ​Helios is called Phaëthon, and also the glittering eye of Heaven or of Zeus; because the eye is the light of the body, and has therefore, in all times, been used as an expression for all the radiant and gleaming phenomena of the sky. For the same reason Helios is the all-seeing (πανόπτης), all-observing, all-investigating, the general spy of gods and men, to whom nothing is hidden or secret. * * * He is likewise a god of the truth of all that is concealed, a god who was wont to be invoked in oaths and by oppressed innocence. From this, the further transition to the principle of wisdom and cognition was easy; and, in this sense, Parmenidēs, in the opening of his philosophico-didactic poem, tells us that he rose to the heights of knowledge riding in the chariot of the sun, and guided by the daughters of Helios; while Pindar, in a very beautiful poem, composed on the occasion of a solar eclipse, had called the ray of the sun the “mother of the eyes, and the fountain of wisdom.” Passages might be quoted from the tragedians to show that the sun was considered the source of sight and blindness, e.g. Eurip. Hekabé, 1066–8; Soph. O. C. 869.

5.  The chariot of the sun is not mentioned in Homer. It is first noticed in the so-called Homeric Hymn to Helios. No particular meaning is to be attached to the axles or wheels; they are mentioned simply to show the ease and rapidity of the motion.

6.  In the passage quoted from Homer in note 2, we learn that the gates of the sky were kept by the Horæ. The names of these, according to Hesiod, are Eunomia, Diké, and Eirené—Order, Justice, and Peace. Thus Parmenidēs, in making Justice the guardian of the gates of the sky, adheres to the ordinary mythology. We learn also from Hesiod—Works and Days, 254 sq.—that Justice was greatly revered by the Olympian gods, standing in very close relation to Zeus, and keeping watch for him over the transgressions of men. The Horæ, it must be remembered, are the daughters of Zeus and Themis (Right). We need not be astonished at the materials of which the gates are said to be made. Even Homer speaks of the heaven as “brazen,” “all-brazen,” and “iron.”

7.  The Goddess (Θεἀ) here meant is evidently the same as the one referred to in line 3, and there called Δαίμων. Ritter, in his History of Philosophy, misled perhaps by Sextus Empeiricus, supposes Diké to be meant. But this is evidently wrong; for Diké is merely the gate-keeper in the mansion of a higher power. Mullach sees this and corrects Ritter, but is nearly as far wrong himself when he affirms that the goddess meant is Wisdom. There are two things particularly to be remarked in regard to the personages mentioned in this poem;—first, their names are always significant; second, not one of them is a personification made by the poet himself, but all are taken from the ​already existing mythology. There is no mention of Zeus, or Athené, or Apollo, or any of the Olympians, neither do we meet with any mere abstract term personified. I cannot find any proof that the Greeks ever personified Wisdom. Pindar, indeed, in his poem On a Solar Eclipse, speaks of “the path of Wisdom,” and I doubt not but similar expressions might be found elsewhere; still this does not amount to a personification of Wisdom. If we observe carefully, we shall, I think, be able to discover the name of the goddess meant. In lines 26, 27, we are informed that it was not an evil fate (Μοῖρα) that had brought the philosopher to the goddess, but that it was Justice and Right (Themis). Now we know already what part Justice (Diké) has taken in bringing him thither; but, so far as we know, Themis has done nothing towards it. Now we know in regard to Themis that she stood in very close relation to Zeus (Odyssey II. 68); that she was by some held to be the eldest of the gods; that Æschylus considered her identical with Gaia (Earth); that she was the goddess of law and order; that she was endowed with knowledge of the future, and that the Delphic oracle belonged to her. before it passed over to Apollo. Pindar tells us, that “First the Fates bore the well-counselled, celestial Themis in their golden chariot from the springs of Ocean to the awful slope of Olympus, along the shining path, to be the time-honored spouse of Zeus the Saviour.” The Fates, who led Themis to Olympus, are daughters of Night, whereas the guides of Parmenidēs are the daughters of the Sun; this fact would almost seem to throw light upon line 7. However this may be, if we consider all the attributes and the lofty position of Themis, we shall probably be convinced that she is the goddess referred to by Parmenidēs. If this be true, Parmenidēs may be supposed to have meant that insight led him to justice or right action, from which he passed to the mother or source of justice, which explained everything to him.

8.  The goddess here mentions two paths, and, a few lines farther on, adds that they are the only ones open to thinking. In line 45, she mentions another path, which however is not open to thinking, being trod only by “unreasoning cattle.”

9.  This line I have translated in a manner entirely different from that of any of the editors of the Fragments. In doing so, I have rejected Mullach’s entirely unauthorized reading, and retained that of one of the best MSS. I understand the line to mean, that every concept which sets itself up as the first principle must be tested by being made universal. If it can stand without any presuppositions, then it is the “True First Principle”; if it does not, it must be rejected. (See Jour, of Spec. Phil., Vol. III., No. 3, p. 288.)

10.  Some space has been devoted to elucidating this Introduction, ​because the interpretation put upon it by Sextus Empeiricus has generally been accepted as the true one.

11.  The goddess now begins her discourse on Truth, the burden of which is that is is the universal predicate, and that there is no not-is. She warns her hearer to avoid believing the opposite doctrine. She sustains the true one by the argument that nothing can be thought or affirmed of that which has no being, and thence arrives at the famous conclusion that being and thinking are identical. Plotinus remarks upon this passage: “Previously (to Plato) Parmenidēs likewise touched upon this view, inasmuch as he reduced Being and mind to the same thing, and affirmed that mind did not lie in the objects of sensation. For when he says that to think and to be are the same thing, he says that this is immovable, and, although he attributes to it the power of thinking, he deprives it of all corporeal movement in order that it may remain unchanged, and likens it to the bulk of a sphere because it holds and comprehends everything, and because thinking is not outside but inside of itself.” (Enneads, V. 1, 8.)

12.  Proklos’s interpretation of these lines runs thus: “For Parmenidēs saw Being itself (as has been said before), that which is abstracted from all things, and the highest of things that are, that wherein the existent was primarily manifested: not that he ignored the multiplicity of objects of intelligence; for it was he who said, ‘For Being approaches to Being’; and again,

and elsewhere,

By all these expressions he shows that he considers that the objects of intelligence are many, and that there is a hierarchy among them of first, and middle, and second, and an ineffable union; thus not ignoring the multiplicity of the things that are, but seeing that the whole of this multiplicity has proceeded from the one Being. For there is the fountain of Being, and the home thereof, and the hidden Being from which the things that are draw their unity.”

13.  Plato, in a connection similar to this, says: “For these things are mere word-puzzles, and it is impossible to affirm in thought whether Being, or Non-Being, or both, or neither, belongs to any one of them.” (Rep. V. 479, C.) Neither Parmenidēs nor Plato had an opportunity of reading Hegel’s Logic, in which it is expressly affirmed that pure Being and pure Nothing are the same.

14.  Plato says: “For the was and the shall be are generated forms of time, although we inadvertently and wrongly apply them to the ​eternal essence. For we say that it was, is, and shall be; yet the is only belongs to it truly, whereas was and shall be are properly predicated of that generation which goes forward in time.” (Tim. 37, E.) Compare The Sentences of Porphyry, Jour, of Spec. Phil., Vol. III., No. 1. The whole of this fragment bears a striking resemblance to one of the hymns in the tenth book of the Rig-Veda. The following translation of it is taken from Max Müller’s History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 546:

15.  Aristotle seems to have this passage in view, when he says: “Parmenidēs seems to hold to the One of reason, and Melissos to the One of matter. Accordingly the former affirms that the One is finite, the latter that it is infinite.” Simplicius put the argument of Parmenidēs in a syllogistic form. “If Being is, and not Non-Being, it must be free from deficiency: but, being free from deficiency, it is perfect; and being perfect, it must have an end, and is therefore not endless. Having an end, it has a limit and a boundary.” It is impossible to render into English the word-quibble on τέλος and τέλειον to which Simplicius here condescends.

16.  This is a very clear statement of the doctrine promulgated by Spinoza—the Parmenidēs of modern philosophy. Hegel (History of ​Philosophy, Vol. III., p. 372) says: “The simple thought of the idealism of Spinoza is: what is true is simply and solely the one substance whose attributes are thinking and extension (Nature): and this absolute unity alone is actual, is the actuality—it alone is God” (p. 376). “This, in general terms, is the Spinozan idea. It is the same as the ὄν of the Eleatics. It is the oriental view, which Spinoza was the first to utter in the West. In general, we may remark that thought had of necessity to occupy the standpoint of Spinozism; that is the true beginning of all philosophy. If one begins to philosophize, ho must begin by being a Spinozist. The soul must bathe in this ether of the one substance, wherein all that was held to be true has vanished. It is to this negation of all particularity that every philosopher must come: it is the freeing of the spirit, and forms its absolute basis. The difference between the latter and the Eleatic philosophy is simply this, that, owing to the influence of Christianity in the modern world, there is present in the mind generally a more concrete individuality. Notwithstanding this infinite demand for the wholly concrete, however, substance is not defined as concrete in itself. Inasmuch, therefore, as the concrete does not lie in the content of substance, it must fall back upon the reflective thinking, and then it is only from the infinite antitheses of the latter that the unity results. Of substance as such nothing more can be predicated; we can speak only of philosophizing concerning it, and of the antitheses cancelled in it. All distinction depends simply upon the nature of the antitheses that are cancelled in it. Spinoza has been very far from demonstrating this as clearly as the ancients took the trouble to do.” The two following propositions from Spinoza’s Ethics will illustrate this:

Book I. Prop. XIV. Besides God no substance can be or be conceived. Demonstration. Since God is an absolutely infinite Being, of which no attribute expressing the essence of substance can be denied, and he exists of necessity; if there were any substance besides God, it would have to be explained by some attribute of God, and thus two substances having the same attribute would exist, which is absurd. Wherefore there can be no substance besides God, and hence none such can be conceived. For if it could be conceived, it would necessarily be conceived as existing, and this, according to the former part of this demonstration, is absurd. Wherefore, besides God, &c. Q. E. D.

Book II. Prop. I. Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing.

17.  Simplicius, in commenting upon this passage, says: “We need not wonder if he says that the one Being is ‘like to the bulk of a well-rounded sphere’; for by this figure he merely aims at a sort of mythological image.”

​18.  Aristotle, Metaph. I, 5, says: “Parmenidēs seems to speak more circumspectly. For laying down Being, and considering Not-Being to be nothing, he of necessity thinks Being to be one, and nothing else. * * * But being compelled to follow the phenomena, and assuming that the One is according to reason, and plurality according to sense, he again lays down the two causes and two first principles, hot and cold—meaning, for example, fire and earth. The former of these, the hot, he arranges on the side of Being, the other on that of Non-Being.” In the extant fragments of Parmenidēs there is no mention of heat or cold, but only of light and darkness.

19.  The word for circlets does not occur in the original, but Cicero (De Naturâ Deorum I. 11) tells us: “Parmenidēs makes a sort of fiction in the likeness of a crown. He gives it the name of στεφάνη, as encircling with a glow of light the sphere which surrounds the heaven, and which he calls God, wherein no one can perceive either divine figure or sense.” One is almost tempted, in reading this fragment, to believe that, according to the view of Parmenidēs, the sun occupied the centre of the material universe, and that the Anima Mundi, or Power that governed all things, was situated in the centre of the sun. There is extant a hymn of Proklos To the Sun, of which the opening lines may be translated thus:

There are many points of resemblance between this poem and the fragments of Parmenidēs, and, as Proklos was well acquainted with the work of the latter, we may with some probability suppose that he adopted his cosmological views. Erdmann, in his Grundriss der Ge​schichte der Philosophie, says: “Parmenidēs’ ideas of the construction of the Universe are either incorrectly handed down, or are unintelligible from their peculiarity of expression. They did not prevent him from having, for his time, important astronomical information.” This is clear from lines 143–4, which evidently refer to the moon.

20.  This agrees somewhat with Hesiod’s statement that Eros (Love) was the child of Chaos and Earth. (Theogony, 121.) Compare also note 14, and Preller’s Griechische Mythologie, Vol. I., p. 393. We know also from Aristotle that Parmenidēs made Love one of the prime movers. The other of the two primal causes (αἰτίαι), mentioned by Aristotle, was doubtless Hate, as indeed we are told by Cicero. This, again, brings us very close to the doctrine of Empedoklēs, whose two great physical principles are Friendship (φιλότης) and Strife (νεῖκος), or, as we should say in modern times, attraction and repulsion.

21.  Theophrastos’s note on this passage is: “Since there are two elements, the cognition is according to the one that prevails; for, according as the hot or the cold has the upper hand, the thought will differ.”

22.  The following Latin version of a passage of Parmenidēs, probably connected with this, but no longer extant, occurs in Cœlius Aurelianus De Morb. Chron. IV. 9: