Parmenides and to Eon by Wilkinson Lisa Atwood;

Author:Wilkinson, Lisa Atwood;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The “Way of Truth”

The second part of Parmenides’ poem comprises between sixty-one and ninety-two lines depending upon the location of seven extant fragments that are preserved in hexameter couplets or isolated bits of verse. Sixty-one lines are preserved in their entirety by the NeoPlatonist Simplicius in the sixth century after the Common Era. These sixty-one lines constitute Fragment 8 which is commonly called “The Way of Truth,” although there is no evidence Simplicius named it such. Still, Fragment 8 is said to offer “the earliest example of an extended philosophical argument.”203 Introduction to this argument is generally said to begin immediately after the thirty-two-line Proem with the Fragment designated B2. In this way, the “Way of Truth” may or may not include part or all of Fragments 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. The sources for Fragments 2, 3, 4, and 5 are various: they include Simplicius but also Proclus, Clement, and Plotinus. Fragment 6, comprising nine lines, comes to us from Simplicius, but Fragment 7, comprising six lines, is a combination from Plato, Aristotle, and Sextus Empiricus.204 Within the “Way of Truth,” then, the exact locations of some of the fragments remain uncertain and it is only by appeal to the “preliminary” comments of the proem that they seem to fit into the “Way of Truth” at all. B2, for instance, follows the goddess’ welcome of the youth to her “House”:

Come, I shall tell you, and do you listen and convey the story, What routes of inquiry {odoi mounai dizesis} alone there are for thinking: The one—that [it] is, and that [it] cannot not be, Is the path of Persuasion, (for it attends upon truth). (B2.1–4)

Translators who bracket the neutral subject “it” alert us that “it” does not appear in the original Greek text. Yet, if we try to read or listen to the passage without “it” or a similar “subject” the passage sounds and looks like:

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