Parmenides of Elea: Fragments

Alan D. Booth is an associate professor of Classics at Brock University
in St. Catharines.

Parmenides, who would have been born (according to Plato’s
information) in the late sixth century, expounded his philosophy in an
epic poem. Some 150 lines, which scholars guess may constitute a third
or a half of the original, have come down to us. One major fragment, 32
lines from the exordium, has been transmitted by the philosopher Sextus
Empiricus. Another 61 lines have been preserved for us by Simplicius,
who wrote commentaries on Aristotle in the sixth century of the present
era. Otherwise there are 17 or 18 much shorter fragments from which to
reconstitute Parmenides’s work, an undertaking that Gallop justly
notes, “resembles the challenge of a jigsaw puzzle with many missing
or damaged pieces, and no picture on the box.” The puzzle is further
complicated by the obscurity of Parmenides’s expression.

To avoid losing his reader in the torturous maze that any commentary on
the fragments must create, Gallop suggests in his introduction how
Parmenides’s philosophy may plausibly be reconstructed and
interpreted, and indicates the principal points of ongoing dispute. The
reader is thus given at the outset a synthetic view based on the
fragments which Gallop subsequently translates from the provided Greek
text. This second section of the volume is preceded by a useful glossary
of Greek terms. Gallop then adds translations of the contexts in which
the fragments occur, translations of ancient references to
Parmenides’s life and work, a biographical directory of the ancient
sources, and a select bibliography. The availability in paperback of
this work, which first appeared in 1984, will furnish the student with
affordable and reliable access to a thinker whom Gallop describes “as
the first extant author deserving to be called a philosopher in the
present-day sense of the word.”