The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy

by A. A. Long

  Parmenides has always been much criticized as a poet, and it must be admitted that what survives of his poem is far more striking for the profundity and acuity of his philosophical thought than for the characteristics we tend to associate with imaginative poetry. Perhaps our impression might be different if more had survived of the second part of his poem, which went on, after the metaphysical doctrines of the first part, to treat in some detail a large variety of sensible phenomena. But even in the extant sections we can see that Parmenides not only in general made novel use of the divine status associated with metrical form in order to legitimate a philosophical discourse transcending human capabilities, but also in particular exploited the linguistic and metrical possibilities of traditional epic in a creative and imaginative way so as to put into this archaic form doctrines that were quite new and foreign to it. This is especially true at the level of diction and of particular epic formulas, and of such motifs as that of the journey.28

  If Parmenides cites the words a goddess spoke to him, Empedocles goes one step further and presents himself to us as a god, who pronounces his own divine poem to an astonished and admiring humanity. This is how his poem referred to as the “Purifications” began:

  Friends, who live in the great city of the yellow Acragas, up on the heights of the citadel, caring for good deeds, I give you greetings. An immortal god, mortal no more, I go about honoured by all, as is fitting, crowned with ribbons and fresh garlands; and by all whom I come upon as I enter their prospering towns, by men and women, I am revered. They follow me in their thousands, asking where lies the road to profit, some desiring prophecies, while others ask to hear the word of healing for every kind of illness, long transfixed by harsh pains. (DK 31 B112)29

  To what extent Empedocles’ claim that he is honoured as a god is realistic, to what extent wishful thinking, we may never know (though the former component is likely to have been larger than some modern readers might expect30); in any case, there is a lack of embarassment in his acknowledgment of his divinity which no parallel hitherto cited from epic or mystery cults makes less remarkable. Not only does Empedocles tell us he is a god but he also explains elsewhere why he has been temporarily exiled from the gods so that he might come to speak to us (he trusted insane Strife: B115), and he lists those highest categories of men whose return to earth leads soonest to a return to divinity: “But at the end they come among men on earth as prophets, bards, doctors and princes; and thence they arise as gods highest in honour, sharing with the other immortals their hearth and their table, without part in human sorrows or weariness” (B146-47). It is surely no coincidence that these are the various professions Empedocles seems to have thought he united in his own person.31

  Empedocles, unlike Parmenides, seems usually to have been admired as a poet32 and teacher of mysteries33 – an extraordinary testimony to this ancient view is a recently rediscovered papyrus of his poetry from Panopolis in Egypt, which was folded and used to make a garland placed on the head of a dead man.34 His reputation is no doubt due not only to his doctrines of transformation and reincarnation, but also to the skill with which he both adapted epic language (as Parmenides, within his limits, had done) and creatively transformed striking poetic devices typical of epic poetry.35

  Two of these techniques, which Empedocles adopts but refunctionalizes in a highly original way, must be indicated at least briefly. The first technique is the repetition of whole verses.36 In Homer this had been a necessary aid to oral composition, which reduced the complexity of the poet’s task by letting him reuse the same verses for the same situations and thereby focus his creativity upon new situations. In Empedocles, on the other hand, the frequent repetition of verses, on at least one occasion explicitly signalled to the reader and justified as such (B25), serves to provide a textual analogy to the cycles of repetition within world history: Empedocles’ poem not only describes such cycles, it also enacts them. The second technique is the epic simile.37 As we have seen, this technique, which the epic tradition had used to prevent an ancient tale of war from gradually becoming remote and uninteresting to a present world of peace, had already been appropriated by earlier Greek philosophers. But Empedocles uses his quite striking and highly developed similes not only to illustrate isolated points in his doctrine that might otherwise be obscure but also to provide a parallel within his poetry for the structure of similarities, horizontal and vertical, at and among all levels of the cosmos, of whose existence and importance his philosophy is designed to convince us. The operation of four basic elements and two fundamental forces in all phenomena means that inevitably there will be patterns of correspondence and analogy throughout Empedocles’ cosmos (e.g., B17.34-35): his similes provide persuasive examples of such patterns throughout his text. In both of these regards, Empedocles does not merely write a philosophical text for which the choice of poetic meter helps to explain the source of his superhuman knowledge; what is more, his creative refunctionalization of specific poetic techniques transforms his poem into a presentation as well as an illustration of his doctrine.

  This is even truer of Heraclitus, the last (though not chronologically) of the poetic philosophers to be considered here. To be sure, Heraclitus composed in prose and not in verse, but the biographical entry on him in the Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda, concludes by asserting that “he wrote many things poetically” (egrapse polla poiêtikôs: DK 22 A1a), and this is probably to be taken not as a reference to spurious poems that might have circulated under his name but rather to the fact that the single prose book for which he was famous was marked by a variety of poetic techniques.38 While the structure of that book is controversial, the frequent absence of connective particles in the quoted fragments is probably not due to the distortions of quotation but rather reflects faithfully the lack of connection among many or all of the sentences that went to make it up. As we saw earlier, its external organization may have been simply a collection of aphorisms, perhaps somewhat like the Aphorisms attributed to Hippocrates: individual memorable formulations, applicable to a variety of situations, grouped perhaps by subject matter, but each effective more on its own terms than because of its place in a chain of argumentation. Very often, what makes these utterances particularly noteworthy is a poetic structure of linguistic or conceptual paradox that attracts our attention but resists immediate understanding, thereby inviting us to reflect upon both Heraclitus’ discourse and the world it illustrates.

  One example may serve to elucidate this procedure: “Of the bow the name is life but the work is death” (DK 22 B48). In what sense is this true? Conceptually, a bow is used to bring death upon whatever we shoot with it, but that object’s death may well serve to save our life if it is an animal that we are hunting so that we can eat it and save ourselves from starvation, or if it is an enemy on the battlefield whom we are fighting and who will doubtless kill us if we do not kill him first. Death and life are linked intextricably with one another in the process of the world: the death of one thing is another’s life, viewed from a different perspective.39 But this complex balance of interdependent opposites is true not only of the world Heraclitus’ sentence describes but also of that very sentence. For the word in the fragment I have translated as “life” is bios, and though this word, accented on the first vowel, does indeed mean “life,” accented on the second one it means “bow.” Hence, depending upon how this sentence is read aloud, it will mean either “Of the bow the name is life but the work is death” (accenting bios) or “Of the bow the name is bow but the work is death” (accenting bíos). Looked at silently, the letters of the word bios can yield both meanings, but the moment they are pronounced (and, at least in this period, most reading was likely not to have been silent) the reader cannot help but accentuate either the one vowel or the other, thereby actualizing the one meaning or the other-and thereby inevitably reducing a complex truth to a one-sided, and hence partially erroneous, oversimplification.40

  Heraclitus’ prose, like the nature of which it speaks, l
oves to hide itself (B123). Aristotle complained that, without punctuation, the articulation and hence the precise meaning of Heraclitus’ utterances was ambiguous (Rhetoric III.5 1407b14-18). But this was no doubt precisely Heraclitus’ intention. For ambiguity is the constitutive feature of the world he describes, and between his own ambiguous Logos (discourse) and the ambiguous cosmic Logos (structure) to which it refers there is a relation of homology,41 already established in the collection’s opening aphorism (the very sentence Aristotle was complaining about):

  Of this Logos which is always men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos men are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep. (B1)

  Just what does the demonstrative adjective toud(e) (this) near the beginning of this sentence point to? Certainly, on the one hand it points to the underlying structure of the cosmos, according to which all things happen but which men have enormous difficulty recognizing. No less certainly, on the other hand, it points to this very book containing this aphorism together with all the others, which most men understand just as little after they have heard it as they did before.

  Thus, like the oracular utterances to which Heraclitus more than once refers, his own aphorisms neither reveal their meaning straightforwardly nor conceal it altogether, but they reveal it by signs (B93,cf. B92). Despite the difference in genre, the closest parallel to this attitude is to be found in Heraclitus’ somewhat younger contemporary Pindar, who also sought an obscure style in his poetry and presented himself as the expounder of the oracular mysteries of the Muses: “Prophesy, Muse, and I will be your interpreter” (fr. 150 Snell-Maehler). This may, indeed, have been one of the reasons that led Heraclitus to dedicate his book to Artemis and deposit it in her temple at Ephesus (D.L. IX.6) – not only, as Diogenes Laertius suggests, to keep it out of the hands of the masses who would have despised it, nor perhaps only to guarantee an authentic copy of his writings at a time when libraries and archives were quite unknown, but also to ensure by its collocation that it would always be seen to speak not just with the voice of a human being, but with the authority of a god.

  4. CONCLUSION

  The season in which philosophers could borrow the techniques of poets in order to authorize their utterances was splendid, but brief. Inevitably, more human modes of philosophical self-justification soon became more plausible. When Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven into the city and compelled it to speak of human matters in a human voice (Cicero, Tusculan disputations V.4.10), he irremediably changed the character of the discipline. Henceforth, with few exceptions, it was to speak in prose, not in poetry, and the prose it spoke was to seek to adhere to the criteria of lucidity and stringency rather than to those of suggestiveness and paradox. Plato would still make ingenious use of such poetic devices as dialogue and myth; but the expression “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” is his (Rep. X.607b), and from the beginning to the end of his career he remained obsessively concerned with finding adequate philosophical arguments for relegating poetry to a noncognitive and philosophically negligible status. Aristotle, as in so many other matters, was following in Plato’s path and drawing out the ultimate consequences of this line of thought when he declared at the beginning of his Poetics, that the fact that Empedocles wrote in verse was irrelevant to deciding what kind of writer he was and that he was therefore to be considered a theorist of nature (physiologos) rather than a poet (1447b17-20). Thereafter, for better and for worse, it was in, and to, the prose of the world that philosophy was largely to dedicate itself.

  Within the past century, to be sure, just when an ideal of scientific clarity was dominating so much of philosophy, a few thinkers have tried to enrich the palette of philosophical discourse by putting such clarity radically into question and seeking other discursive modes. Of the three most celebrated examples – Friedrich Nietzsche’s vatic lucubrations and literary experiments, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s paradoxical formulations and attention to language, and Martin Heidegger’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics and return to the insights of poets and the earliest philosophers – Wittgenstein seems to have undergone virtually no direct influence on the part of the early Greek philosophers, but the degree to which the other two were inspired and guided by these thinkers, above all by Heraclitus, can hardly be exaggerated. Investigating this issue would no doubt contribute significantly towards a better understanding of the nature and limits of modern philosophy.

  NOTES

  1 On the relation between the development of the modern term “Presocratic” and the ancient sources, see E. Hoffmann, “Die Vorsokratiker in antiker Tradition,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 1 (1946) 190–96 and G. W. Most, . Die Vorsokratiker in der Forschung der Zwanziger Jahre,” in H. Flashar, ed. Altertumswissenschaft in den 20er Jahren (Stuttgart, 1995) 87–114.

  2 See Mansfeld in this volume, p. 23.

  3 Lanata [536] provides a useful collection of much of the material, with Italian translation and commentary.

  4 My translations in this chapter have been taken, with slight modifications occasionally, from KRS.

  5 See Babut [525].

  6 See Broadie in this volume, p. 212.

  7 See Babut [526].

  8 On this passage, see also in this volume Long, p. 9, and Hussey, p. 90.

  9 See Delatte [532] and Murray [542].

  10 See in general Buffière [529], Pépin [543].

  11 See Laks and Most [537], and Most [541].

  12 See Richardson [547], Most [540], and Woodruff in this volume, Chapter 14.

  13 For general surveys of the poetics of archaic epic, see especially the relevant sections of Maehler [539] and Fränkel [97].

  14 On the theme in archaic poetry of pessimism about human knowledge, see Lesher in this volume, p. 225.

  15 See G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans. Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore, 1979).

  16 On this passage, see Lesher in this volume, p. 229.

  17 For recent discussion, cf. Wright [358]; Osborne [364]; Sedley [377]; and Inwood [357].

  18 For the sentence, see Algra in this volume, p. 56.

  19 For this section, cf. especially Snell [128] 136-52; Bernabé [527]; and Long [547] 245–53.

  20 On the various attractions of prose in archaic Greece, see Humphreys [534].

  21 See Riezler [548]; Kranz [535]; Snell [128] 199-204; Lloyd [108].

  22 So, recently, Wöhrle [553] 176–79.

  23 See Heitsch [191].

  24 Il. XVIII.604; Od. I.336, IV.17, VIII.43, etc.

  25 See the material collected in H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1956).

  26 Cf. Tarán [276], for example, p. 31.

  27 See for example, Bowra [528]; Deichgräber [530]; Fränkel [147] 158–73; Mansfeld [308]; Burkert [284]; Feyerabend [533]; Sassi [550].

  28 See especially Mourelatos [309]; Pfeiffer [544]; Pieri [545]; and Coxon [270].

  29 On this fragment, see most recently Riedweg [367], who emphasizes its affiliations with the mysteries.

  30 Rösler [549] finds the claim so bizarre that he feels driven to assume that Empedocles is ironically criticizing those who adulate him excessively.

  31 Wright [358] 291–92.

  32 So even by Aristotle (fr.70 Rose, Meteor. 357a24f., Rhetoric III.5 1407a 34f.), despite Poetics 1 1447b17–20.

  33 For a recent example, see Kingsley [105].

  34 See Primavesi [546].

  35 See Traglia [552].

  36 The passages can be found in Bollack [356] vol. 3.2, p. 618, s.v. “Répétition.”

  37 See Snell [128] 213–18.

  38 For Heraclitus’ rhythmic prose, see Deichgräb
er [530].

  39 See also his aphorism B88, cited and discussed by Hussey in this volume, p. 102.

  40 For other examples of such sophisticated play with vocalized reading in archaic Greece, see Svenbro [551].

  41 On the meanings of Logos in Heraclitus, see A. Busse, “Der Wortsinn von bei Heraklit,” RM 75 (1926) 203–14, and Hussey in this volume, p. 91.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  This bibliography gives full references to all the modern works cited in each chapter by a number in square brackets (e.g., Barnes [14]). It also includes a wide range of further studies but does not repeat references (generally to works that fall outside the main stream of scholarship on Greek philosophy) already given in full in the book’s footnotes. The bibliography has been selected on the basis of a policy that privileges standard works in any language, works written in English, and especially recent works. However, some of the best scholarship is relatively old and much of it is written in French, German, and Italian, so this policy has had no more than a guiding influence on the selection. Brief annotations are provided, sometimes in order to commend a work that will be found particularly useful, but the absence of such commendation has no negative implications.