This is unpublished English translation of the paper originally published in Russian:

Лебедев А.В. Западногреческие философские поэмы и гомеровская традиция:

преемственность или разрыв?, в кн.: Индоевропейское языкознание и классическая
филология, Чтения памяти И.М.Тронского, Институт лингвистических исследований
РАН, Спб, 2010, сс. 101 – 110.
Lebedev A.V., Western Greek philosophical poems and the Homeric tradition: continuity or
revolt? In: Indo-European linguistics and Classical philology - XIV (Joseph M. Tronsky
memorial Conference). Proceedings of the International Conference, St. Petersburg, 22-23
June 2010, 101-110.
The bibliography has been updated and corresponding references added in the text, some
explanatory remarks have been added in square brackets. Please, cite this paper by the page of
the published Russian version printed in bold type near the left margin, not by the page of this
file.

A.V. Lebedev

WESTERN GREEK PHILOSOPHICAL POEMS AND THE HOMERIC

TRADITION: CONTINUITY OR REVOLT?

[p. 101]

Since the discussion will focus mainly on the Italian philosophers and their relation to the

epic tradition, it is necessary to begin with explanation of how we understand the specific

character of the Italian tradition and what makes it distinct from the Ionian one. As we have

repeatedly pointed out, the term and concept of «Presocratics» and “Presocratic” philosophy

in modern historiography of Greek philosophy is an artificial construction of the XIX

century, which has neither historical nor philosophical meaning [Lebedev 1989; 2010 passim;

2017: 496; 2018: 717 etc.]. The authors of the ancient “Successions” were closer to the truth

when they distinguished two relatively independent early Greek philosophical traditions – the

Ionian originating with Thales, and the Italian originating with Pythagoras. Italian philosophy

was created by Pythagoras on a fundamentally different basis as an idealist antithesis to the

1
Ionian naturalism and set totally different tasks: not a detached empirical scientific research,

but an ethical-religious Weltanschaung with life-building educational goal [what later became

known as «art of life», τέχνη βίου]. The representatives of the two traditions understood

differently and even called by different names their pursuit of knowledge: the Ionians called it

“investigation» (ἱστορία) of nature, and the Italians called it “love of wisdom” (φιλοσοφία).

[The ancient tradition of Pythagoras as inventor of the terms φιλόσοφος, φιλοσοφία is grosso

modo reliable and historically correct. Plato followed Pythagoreans]. For the former, the key

concept was φύσις (nature), for the latter ἀλήθεια (truth) and ψυχή (soul). The cosmic

harmonia of the Pythagoreans was not just a law of nature (like Anaximander's law of equal

compensation in material change), but an ethical-political paradigm for moral education and

ascetic discipline of the will (and at the same time an «empirical» argument for creationism, a

tekmerion).

[p.102]

In all fundamental problems of philosophy, these two traditions contradicted one another

and were engaged in passionate debate. In metaphysics and cosmology the Ionians asserted

the radical naturalistic monism, which recognized the universality of the laws of nature,

actually abolished the traditional concept of "heaven" (in Ionian astronomy celestial bodies

are not divine and consist of the same earthly elements) and deconstructed the traditional

mythopoetic division of the world into the celestial-divine-immortal, and earthly-human-

mortal. They also believed in the infinity of the Universe and innumerable worlds

(Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Democritus). The Italians were dualists in both metaphysics and

cosmology; the division of the cosmos into the divine superlunar and fluent sublunary part

was in a sense a restoration of the mythopoetic picture of the world. In the theory of

knowledge the Ionians tended towards empiricism and sensualism, the Italians - towards

radical rationalism, apriorism and mathematical essentialism. The Ionian naturalistic monism

2
took for granted the corporeal nature and mortality of the soul which was not different from

the physical elements. The Italians, on the contrary, recognized the soul as an immortal being

(daimon) of a different nature only temporarily connected with the mortal body. In his poem

(originally conceived as a «Sacred word», hieros logos of Pythagoras) Parmenides rejected

the Ionian naturalism and evolunionary cosmology as «the way of non-being» and proclaimed

the victory of «the way of being», i.e. of the divine philosophy of Pythagoras (received in a

revelation from gods by Apollonian Kouros) which conceives the true reality as immutable

sphere of mental light and the «invisible Sun of Justice» [Lebedev 2017].

The Greek prose was born together with the Ionian philosophy: the treatise “On Nature”

by Anaximander (c. 546 BC) was the first Greek written composition in prose. The Italian

philosophers (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles) chose the poetic form. The question is

why and what is their relationship to the epic tradition? Some researchers (usually

philosophers) did not attach special importance to this fact, apparently believing, following

Plutarch, that “the poems of Empedocles and Parmenides, the Antidotes by Nikander and the

Gnomai of Theognis are just philosophical discourses (λόγοι) borrowing the meter from

poetry as a means of sublime style in order to avoid prosaic character ”(How to listen to poets,

2. 16 C). Others (mostly philologists, but not only), on the contrary, recognized the

congeniality of the mythopoetic language to the philosophical quest for truth, and some went

so far as to see in the epic tradition the key to interpretation of philosophical poems of the 5th

century B.C. (e.g. Mourelatos 1970. 2008). Our position can be summarized as follows.

Since Western Greek philosophers used the meter and language (though not always and not

completely) of the epic tradition of Homer and Hesiod, the historian of the early Greek

philosophy will have to consult from time to time Chantrain's Homeric Grammar or the

Lexicon of the Early Greek Epos in order to interpret certain syntactical constructions or some

obscure expressions in Parmenides or Empedocles.

3
[p. 103]

But the theory that Parmenides was a real continuer of the epic tradition which already

contained in a preexisting form, as in Anaxagorean panspermia, all the “themes” and

“motives” of Parmenides' poem, and therefore provides a key to the solution of all riddles of

the philosophical texts, or even paradigmatic models for the interpretation, for example, of

Parmenides' proem as a whole, is completely unfounded and can only produce hermeneutical

chimeras. This theory goes back to the works of Hermann Diels (who himself, admittedly, did

not exaggerate Parmenides’s dependence on Homer), and later various aspects of it were

developed by Eric Havelock (1958), Alexander Mourelatos (1970. 2008), Jaap Mansfeld

(1964) and others. It should be emphasized that the key text for the supporters of this

approach has always been precisely the proem of Parmenides, and primarily the comparison

of the traveling Kouros in the proem of Parmenides with the “return” of Odysseus in Homer.

And this comparison, in turn, has always been based on the third verse of the Parmenides'

proem as it was established by Diels in his separate edition of Parmenides in 1897 and then

reprinted in all the editions of “Vorsokratiker” up to the 6th edition edited by W. Kranz

(1951):

δαίµονος, ἣ κατὰ πάντ ̓ ἄστη φέρει εἰδότα φῶτα "... (the way) of the goddess that leads

the knowing man across all cities» (Parmenides B 1, 3 DK)

After Diels many scholars saw in this verse an allusion to the third verse of the Homeric

Odyssey: πολλῶν δ ̓ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα ... «(man) who saw the cities of many peoples». In

the critical apparatus of Diels-Kranz it is stated that ἄστη «cities» is a reading of the best

manuscript of Sextus Empicius who cites the proem (codex N), the other two manuscripts

give meaningless readings πάντ᾽ἀτη (codex L) and πάντα τῆ (codex Ες) (Diels-Kranz, Bd.I,

228 adn. 19).

4
 In his critical edition of the fragments of Parmenides Coxon (1986: 45; 2008: 49)

convincingly demonstrated that Diels was wrong. On the photograph of the Sextus manuscript

in Coxon (1986, after p.40; 2009 after p.41) it is clearly visible that the codex N has the same

meaningless reading παν τατη. So, the "cities" (ἄστη) across which the Kouros of Parmenides

allegedly travels, turned out to be a figment of Diels’s imagination, and the whole theory of

the Homeric influence on the imagery of Parmenides' proem collapsed.

[p. 104]

Diels' reading ἄστη is not only not attested in MSS. tradition, but it cannot be defended as a

plausible conjecture, either, since the Kouros in Parmenides does not travel across cities like

Odysseus at all, but flies in a winged chariot with «blazing» axis and accompanied by the

«daughters of the Sun» to the heaven, away from human cities, and the road he travels lies

outside human world (ἀνθρώπων ἐκτὸς πάτου) as the goddess clearly states in verse B 1.27.

Odysseus, in turn, does not travel in a chariot, so nothing whatsoever remains of the

comparison that gave birth to abundant scholarly literature de nihilo.

Coxon suggests (after Heyne) the following restoration: δαίµονος, ἣ κατὰ πάντ ̓ ἄ <ν> τη <ν>

φέρει εἰδότα φῶτα “... goddess who carries the knowing man straight ahead”, which is not

very convincing. The translation of the verse in Lebedev 1989 (FRGF: 286) “road that leads

the man of knowledge in a rapid flight across the Universe” is based on the conjecture πάντα

ποτῆι. [now for the defence of this reading and a new interpretation of the imagery of the

proem see Lebedev 2017]. The image of the winged chariot of the soul in Plato's Phaedrus

(246a) is inspired by this verse of Parmenides in its original form.

Other dubious interpretations were proposed by Burkert, who saw a katabasis in the journey

of Kouros, and by Mansfeld who claims that Kouros returns “already knowing”, that is, after

having received the revelation, and therefore the goal of his journey is the realm of Night, but

not of Light. Mansfeld's interpretation is based on an arbitrary comparison of the cosmology

5
of the Parmenides' Proem (“Gates of the Day and Night”) with the description of Tartarus in

Hesiod's Theogony. This interpretation is also reproduced in the recent entry “Parmenides” in

the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Mansfeld and his supporters ignore the fact that

Hesiod and Parmenides are divided by centuries, in the course of which occured the scientific

revolution in 6th century Miletus, which radically changed the picture of the world, and

appeared the new doctrine of the immortal soul in Orphism and Pythagoreanism with which

Parmenides is closely related [see the defence of the ancient tradition about Parmenides as

Pythagorean in Lebedev 2017]. Parmenides was not only a metaphysician, but also a scientist

who was at the height of the medical and astronomical knowledge of his time. He accepted

the new geocentric model in astronomy, he knew about the sphericity of the Earth, the true

cause of solar eclipses, and he is credited with the discovery of the identity of the Morning

and Evening Star.

[p. 105]

A person of a such level of sophisticated knowledge in the field of astronomy could not

take seriously the naive mythopoetic cosmography of Hesiod with its “roots of the Earth”

stretching down into the misty «Tartarus»: he could only smile reading this. Implanting such

views in the astronomy of Parmenides is just as anachronistic as attributing to Hesiod

Pythagorean or Platonic astronomy. But the point is not only in the doubtfulness of the

method, but also in the absurdity of the result produced by it. The author of the article

“Parmenides” (J. Palmer, 2008 edition) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes the

following:

“These maidens take Parmenides to whence they themselves have come, to “the halls of Night

”(fr. 1.9), before which stand “the gates of night and day ”(fr. 1.11)”.

Palmer does not take into account that the whole poem of Parmenides is built on the

parallelism of the opposition “being versus non-being” in the “Way of Truth” and the

6
opposition “light versus night” in the “Way of opinion”. In the language of Parmenides, light

is a symbol of being and truth, night is a symbol of non-being and ignorance. The teacher of

Parmenides was the Pythagorean Ameinias, and in the Pythagorean table of opposites light is

correlated in a systoikhia with the good, and darkness with the evil. In all known versions of

this metaphysics of light, attested in different religious, poetic and mythological traditions of

different peoples in different times light is invariably a positive symbol of knowledge, truth,

justice etc., and darkness a symbol of ignorance, lies, evil etc. The question is, how could

Parmenides with his Pythagorean (i.e. puritanic) background, who was a legislator in Elea and

who was honored with a statue in Hellenistic times (apparently for educating citizens in virtue

by his laws), teach his fellows that the goal of human life is to fall into the infernal abyss of

darkness and evil, and not to ascend to the celestial heights of good and light? Palmer should

not have cut the quote at verse 9, πέµπειν ... προλιποῦσαι δώµατα Νυκτός «having left behing

the abodes of Night», but had to continue with the verse 10: εἰς φάος κτλ. «towards the Light»

etc. It is obvious that the purpose of the journey is the Light, and not the left behind "abodes

of the Night". The fact that Kouros flies to Heaven is further proved by the verse 13, where

the destination of the journey, the Gates of the Day and Night, are described as being located

“high in the sky» (αἰθέριαι with local meaning since they are made of bronze), i.e. celestial,

and by no means chthonic.

So, the poems of the "Italian" philosophers suggest a completely different picture of the

world, which has little in common with the ideas about the world and man at the time of

Homer or Hesiod.

[p. 106]

The same has to be said about the use of traditional mythological names in philosophical

poetry. The referential meanings of these names in almost all cases, without exception, have

not just changed, but have been consciously reinterpreted, and precisely in order to

7
correspond to the new picture of the world. These names no longer refer to the

anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod, but to the physical elements, parts of the

cosmos, forces of nature, abstract and eschatological concepts, etc. In Empedocles Zeus,

Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis are allegorical names of the four elements, Aphrodite is the name

of the force of attraction and the harmonious connection of the elements. In his Doxa

Parmenides expounded a complete allegorical theogony, unfortunately known only

fragmentarily. We only know that the creator-demiourgos in the Doxa was Aphrodite

(exactly as in Empedocles, another common Pythagorean feature), and that her first creation

was Eros (fr. B13): “She fashioned Eros the very first of all gods ...”.

Obviously, this was followed by a whole genealogy of allegorically reinterpreted gods of the

traditional poetic mythology. The fact that the genealogy of these popular gods is placed in

the “Way of Opinion” itself should emphasise the illusory nature of the polytheistic pantheon

in contrast to the monotheistic metaphysical doctrine of the “Way of Truth”. Divine

knowledge recognises only one god, human knowledge recognises many. Such a theological

theory of “dual truth” in the poem by Parmenides finds an exact correspondence in

Xenophanes of Colophon, who on the one hand naturalistically interprets the gods of the

popular faith (like Iris and Dioscuri) as poetic fiction (B 10–16), and on the other hand

affirms the existence of the “one, the greatest” philosophical god (B 23–26) conceived as pure

mind.

This brings us to our main question. If the picture of the world, the theology and the ideas

about man and the meaning of his life of the Italian philosophers were not only different from,

but often opposite to the picture of the world and the corresponding ideas of the early epic

poetry, then one may wonder what motivated them when they chose the traditional Homeric

hexameter to present their radically new ideas? Why they did not follow the example of their

8
Ionian colleagues and did not reject the archaic poetic form together with the archaic religious

content? Why they did not write in prose?

[p. 107]

We see here not an expression of continuity, but something different. Firstly, the claim of

possession or pursuit of superhuman knowledge and “divine” authority, which was already

mentioned above in connection with the specific character of the Italian tradition as opposed

to the Ionian one. Of all the meters of Greek poetry, the hexameter was the most solemn and

“hieratic”; both the Homeric hymns to gods and the oracles of Pythia oracles (at least in the

final edited form) were composed in hexameter. The 6th century mystical movements

preceding the Eleatics (Orphic theogonies, the Theogony of Epimenides) also chose the

hexameter as the most appropriate meter for poets who wrote before the Trojan War

(Orpheus, Musaios and Linos). The second point, connected with the first and no less

important, is described by Plato in the 10th book of the Republic as an “ancient quarrel”

(παλαιὰ ἔχθρα) between philosophy and poetry. The choice of Homeric medium to combat

Homer was a polemical device of peritrope type [on this see Lebedev 2018: 780-781]. It is an

attempt to dethrone Homer from the position of the king of poets and to deprive his poems of

the exclusive place in Greek educational school practice, to replace them. According to the

consonant testimony of Heraclitus and Xenophanes, in the late 6th and early 5th centuries

Homer was venerated as "the wisest of the Greeks" (Heraclitus B 56), and all the Greeks

"from the beginning have learned according to Homer" (Xenophanes B 10). A philosophical

or theological text written in prose could not be perceived as an alternative to Homer;

philosophical poems expoundig a new theology and new doctrines about the world and man

in elevated solemn language made it clear by the very use of the Homeric hexameter that

Homer was overcome and antiquated, they replaced Homer rather than «continued» him.

Such polemical use of an artistic form or phraseology of an opponent for his refutation

9
(resembling a parody, but devoid of humorous overtones) can be called peritropic, from

Greek περιτροπή. In Greek logic peritrope is a technical term for self-refuting argument. So,

according to Sextus Empiricus, Democritus and Plato "turned" against Protagoras his own

thesis that "πᾶσα φαντασία ἐστὶν ἀληθής": if every opinion is true, then the opinion that not

every opinion is true, is also true, and, therefore, the thesis of Protagoras is self-refuting.

[p.108]

(Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. 7. 389). We use this term not in its exact narrow logical sense, but in

the wider sense, as a name of a polemical device which, like a “boomerang»,

makes use of any means (including expressive and rhetorical) or of the thesis of the opponent

and «turns it over» against him by “altering” its content. For example, the following

Heraclitus' fragment (B 53/32 Leb.) provides an example of the use of peritrope in his

polemics with Homer:

Πόλεµος πάντων µὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς... “War is the father of all and the king

of all: some he makes gods, and others humans, some he turns into slaves, others sets free."

Polemically substituting for the name of Zeus the name of Polemos (War) in the familiar to

everybody Homeric formula of Zeus (“the father of gods and men”), Heraclitus rhetorically

uses the Homeric formula to disprove Homer, who considered “gods and men” as two

separate and unchanging categories of beings (mortals and immortals). According to

Heraclitus, the cosmic law of the unity and cyclical interchange of opposites constantly

changes their roles.

Another example of polemical peritrope is provided by the theory of the origin of divine

names in the Derveni papyrus [for details see Lebedev 2018]. The sophistic author (Prodicus

of Ceos) in his polemics against the religious conservatives and diviners (like Diopeithes),

who demanded to ban the teaching in Athens of «atheistic» Anaxagorean doctrines of the

origin of the world and celestial phenomena and referred to the authority of Orpheus as a

10
source of ancient piety, reinterprets the Orphic theogony as an allegorical exposition of

Anaxagorean naturalistic cosmogony, thereby "turning over" the alleged authority of the

«ancient wise» against them. Examples can be multiplied. Obviously, peritrope was a

widespread polemical device in the Greek culture of philosophical debates. Such peritropic

character, in our opinion, also had the adoption of the Homeric hexameter by the Western

Greek philosophers (predominantly Pythagoreans) and its adaptation to the needs of the new

philosophy which replaced the traditional anthropomorphic polytheism of Homer and Hesiod

with the new metaphysical monotheism, creatonism and mentalist conception of god as

«mind» [Lebedev 2017bis; 2018: 513 ff.]. In the philosophical poem of Parmenides the

second part (Doxa, the Way of Opinion) has a peritropic character. It looks like an

assimilation of the Ionian naturalistic evolutionary physics (which is alien to the spirit of

Pythagorean metaphysics on which Parmenides was educated), but at the same time it

declares all generation and all cosmogony «deceptive» (B 8.52 κόσµον ἐµῶν ἐπέων ἀπατηλὸν

ἀκούων).

[p. 109]

Extrapolating this observation to the Western Greek philosophy as a whole we can say that

the very creation of the Pythagorean dualistic metaphysics and cosmology as such contained

a peritropic tendency: to neutralize the danger presented by Ionian physics for the traditional

religious picture of the world and belief in gods not by the obscurantist denial of physics and

science as such, but by constructing a new, reformed and “turned over” teleological and

creationist physics and cosmology, which not only does not contradict the ancient religious

dualism (body and soul, divine and mortal, heaven and earth), but also serves as a quasi-

scientific and mathematical foundation of it. Plato's Timaeus can also be considered as a

polemical creationist peritrope (“turning-over”) of the mechanistic atomistic physics of

Democritus.

11
 Bibiliography

Burkert, Walter (1969): Das Proömium des Parmenides und die Katabasis des Pythagoras.

in: Phronesis 14 (1969) 1-30 = Kleine Schriften VIII (Philosophica), 2008, 1-27.

Coxon (1986) - Coxon A. H. The Fragments of Parmenides. Assen

Coxon (2009) Coxon A.H. The Fragments of Parmenides, Revised and expanded edition,

Las Vegas.

Diels, Hermann (1897). Parmenides' Lehrgedicht, Berlin.

Diels Hermann und Kranz Walter (1951. 2004), Die Fragmente det Vorsokratiker, Bd. 1,

Berlin.

Havelock, Eric (1958): Parmenides and Odysseus, in: Harvard Studies in Classical

Philology 63 (1958) 133-143.

Lebedev (1989): ФРГФ – Fragmenty rannih grecheskih filosofov, Moscow, 1989.

Lebedev A.V. (2010): «Getting rid of the «Presocratics», paper delivered at the Round
Table «Getting rid of the Stereotypes in the History of Philosophy» at the International
UNESCO Day of Philosophy Annual Conference held in the Institute of Philosophy,
Moscow, 14-15 November, 2009. Published in: Filosofiia v dialoge kul'tur (Philosophy in the
dialogue of cultures), Moscow, «Tradition», 2010, pp. 177-183.
Lebedev A.V. (2017): Parmenides the Pythagorean: Monistic Idealism (Mentalism) in
Archaiс Greek Metaphysics, in: Indo-Europen linguistics and Classicall philology - XX (2)
(Joseph M. Tronsky memorial Conference). Proceedings of the International Conference, St.
Petersburg, 26-28 June 2017 / edited by Nikolai N. Kazansky. St.Petersburg: Nauka 2017.
pp.493-536.
Lebedev, Andrei (2017bis): Epicharmus on God as Mind (ΝΟΟΣ). Α Neglected Fragment
in Stobaeus. (With some remarks on early Pythagorean metaphysics and theology), in:
Artisteas, vol.XVI (2017) 13-27.
Lebedev A.V. (2018): The Derveni papyrus and Prodicus of Ceos // Indo-European
linguistics and Classicall philology - XXI (2) (Joseph M. Tronsky memorial Conference).
Proceedings of the International Conference, St. Petersburg, 18-20 June, 2017 / edited by
Nikolai N. Kazansky. St.Petersburg: Nauka, 2018. pp. 713-790.
Mansfeld, Jaap (1964): Die Offenbarung des Parmenides und die menschliche Welt. Assen.

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 Mourelatos, A.P.D. (1970): The Route of Parmenides. New Haven. (2007) Revised and
expanded edition, Las Vegas.
Palmer, John (2008) entry «Parmenides» in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Summary

Andrei V. Lebedev. Western Greek Philosophical Poems and the Homeric Tradition:

Continuation or Revolt?

Why did western Greek philosophers (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles), unlike their

Eastern Ionian colleagues, chose the Homeric hexameter rather than prose to express their

thought? It has been thought by some that these philosophical poems represent a continuation

or adaptation of the Homeric tradition for didactic purposes. We reject this interpretation

because it ignores the fundamental difference between the Ionian and Italian philosophical

traditions. The Ionian tradition was scientific in spirit and therefore used Ionian prose. The

Italian tradition starting from Pythagoras was a revolt against the Ionian naturalistic monism

and an attempt to restore the traditional religious world-view in a new quasi-scientific form.

Western Greek philosophy from the start was ethical-religious in its aims, and therefore it

chose the most “hieratic” poetic medium of the time, the language of Pythia and Apollo. And

in doing so it did not aim so much at the “continuation” of the Homeric tradition as at

“replacing” the old bad mythology of the poets with a good new one, just as Plato later tried

to replace bad old myths with new philosophical myths of his own. Western Greek

philosophical poems, consequently, should be viewed not as a revival of the old epic poetry,

but as its radical reform and a peritrope. In Greek dialectics peritrope was a technical term for

“turning over” of the opponent’s argument against himself. We use this term in a less

technical and a wider sense of a polemical device which aims at “defeating an opponent with

his own weapons”. Peritrope is an often neglected polemical device of the Greek culture of

the philosophical debate. E.g. the cosmogony of Plato’s “Timaeus” can be interpreted as a

13
creationist peritrope of the Ionian (and atomistic) naturalistic determinist physics. And the

Derveni papyrus (i.e. "Horai" of Prodicus of Ceos) presents exactly the reverse case: a

polemical naturalistic peritrope of the creationst Orphic (i.e. Pythagorean) theogony.

14