PARMENIDES’ INQUIRY AND THE LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF THE WAYS

Resumo

Critics often consider the division in Parmenides’ poem among fields of knowledge or not knowledge, depicted in a polar perspective. In the tale of the journey the division emerges, for example, with the allusion to the day and the night or with the image of the door and in a polar perspective unravels the speech given by the goddess in the vibrant exhortation to achieve both the truth and the opinion, which does not convince. In the complex panorama of the preserved fragments, the desire to describe the result of inquiry, being, as redemption from the darkness, which conditions the life of mortals, is woven with the desire to stress the choice among the ways of inquiry, not all positive, not all oriented towards the truth. Certainly, the ways of inquiry. But how many? The division involves the opinion, the ghost of not being, the doctrines of Heraclitus or the common people, with the metaphors of deafness and blindness. It is useful to check the literary tradition and this paper will try to understand the choice among the ways of inquiry by means of the peculiar pattern of the Priamel, the frame of parallel structures which underlines in Sappho’s song or in the corpus of Pindar the new conception that the author offers.