3.1.1 The oimē, Themes, and Rhetorical Schemata

At first glance, Foucault’s notion of a rhetorical schema might be thought to approach two topics in Homeric studies: the use of metapoetic devices, and so-called catalogic discourse. The latter we shall explore below (see Section 3.1.4); the former we shall examine here, in large part to clarify one way in which I do not intend to use Foucault’s term when discussing epic poetry.

Scholars have discerned a number of metapoetic images at work at various points in the Iliad and the Odyssey. According to one view, the poem is a craft production, an object constructed in the manner of Odysseus’ raft, for example, or his well-made bed.Footnote ⁶ According to a more well-developed tradition, the Homeric text has been seen to emerge at the intersection of imagery related to weaving and sewing.Footnote ⁷ The unavoidable point of comparison in this context, however, is the oimē, or ‘path of song’.Footnote ⁸

Although there may seem to be many tantalizing similarities between the oimē as a metapoetic figure and what we shall examine under the rather cumbersome name of the ‘rhetorical schema of the figure of the hodos’, caution must be exercised.Footnote ⁹ One prominent conceptualization of the oimē takes each particular segment of the path to be a ‘theme’ in the Parry–Lord sense;Footnote ¹⁰ the idea is that these oimai are ‘tracks cut into the landscape’ that link together end on end and, taken collectively, define a ‘map’ of Epos.Footnote ¹¹ Are these oimai, perhaps, coextensive with Foucauldean rhetorical schemata?

The answer, at least in this book, is no. The reason the answer is no depends in part, however, on just what it is that one means by oimē. The way that the word is used in the Odyssey suggests that an oimē in fact comprises a relatively large unit. Demodocus’ postprandial performance, described in terms of an oimē in one of only three passages where the word appears in Homer, encompasses ‘The Quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles’; later, Odysseus will ask him to ‘move along [the path of song] and sing “The Fashioning of the Wooden Horse”’.Footnote ¹² These are both apparently rather lengthy productions; if that is the case, their scale is larger than that to which the rhetorical schema of the hodos will refer. (For comparison, Circe’s foretelling of Odysseus’ hodos in Odyssey 12, the central example of the rhetorical schema of the hodos that I examine below, occupies slightly more than 100 lines (12.27–141) of the four books of aoidē Odysseus makes it through in a single evening with the Phaeacians; one hardly imagines that Demodocus discharges his duties with such brevity.) On this understanding, an oimē would seem to be something considerably longer than the amount of text governed by a rhetorical schema, at least as we find it in Homer.Footnote ¹³

Other discussions of the oimē emphasize the idea that it is something that a poet can hop on or off at any number of points along the grand path of Epos as a whole. On this view, as a poet performs, ‘no matter how small the scale of the performance’ he or she would simply be on the oimē, the ‘path of song’, in virtue of orally performing a poem.Footnote ¹⁴ There is an important question, not always clearly expressed, about whether this idea should focus on the word-by-word, line-by-line process of bardic composition, or whether individual units on this larger epic path of song correspond to something closer to a Parry–Lord ‘theme’.Footnote ¹⁵

In the first case, the claims scholars have made about the way that the structure of a text conforms to certain patterns – and is perhaps even dictated by certain rules – are very much of the sort I shall develop below. Here again, however, there is an important difference of scale. This strand of analysis of the ‘path of song’ addresses units of text – phrases and lines – of a smaller scale than I intend to investigate via the term ‘rhetorical schema’; rather, units of text of this size are better discussed under the rubric ‘types of dependence’, addressed in Section 3.1.3 below.

In the second case, it is possible to imagine the relationship between a theme and an oimē as corresponding to, or perhaps instantiating, a form of the narratological distinction between story and plot or narrative. This is an attractive hypothesis, and it opens a vista onto an exciting perspective of Homeric poetics. But any such relationship between story and narrative is also different in kind from the relationship I wish to capture under the term ‘rhetorical schema’. Why so? If, on the one hand, any theme can be expressed along the path of song (and, on this view, all themes necessarily would be) and, on the other, every path of song maps onto simply one or another of the ‘themes’ in the mythic repertoire, then the level of connection between the content of the story (the theme) and the manner in which it is narrativized (via movement along the path of song) as plot is necessarily a rather general one.Footnote ¹⁶ By contrast, as we shall see, the rhetorical schema governed by the hodos, at least as I examine it here, dictates a far more precise relationship between story and narrative. While it is undoubtedly valuable to combine the two understandings of oimē as ‘theme’ and ‘path of song’,Footnote ¹⁷ current scholarship on this topic allows for considerable flexibility in the relationship between the level of story and the level of plot – and this gap between the more macro structure of a theme and the micro structure of a visual poetics of the oimē is precisely the gap filled in part by the rhetorical schema that will be so important in what follows.Footnote ¹⁸

3.1.2 Text-Types, Discourse Modes, and Enunciative Modalities

Classic studies of text-types define these to be ‘underlying (or overriding) structures that can be actualized by different surface forms’.Footnote ¹⁹ On the traditional view, there is always a single, dominant (underlying or overriding) text-type that characterizes any given text. Because the roots of this approach to textual analysis are to be found in literary criticism, the text-type ‘narration’ has received the most attention and usually serves as the central, positively constructed term against which other text-types are negatively defined.Footnote ²⁰ Two aspects of narration are usually deemed key characteristics: first, that narration depicts ‘events or sequences of events’ and, second, that the ‘order in which events happen is significant’.Footnote ²¹ By contrast, description is ‘oriented to the statics of the world – states of affairs, enduring properties, coexistants’;Footnote ²² it often introduces elements of the story-world – persons, places, things – and/or attributes qualities to these elements.Footnote ²³

While in the case of narration the text’s underlying progression is primarily temporal, in the case of description the text’s underlying progression is primarily spatial.Footnote ²⁴ Scholars have often claimed that important implications follow from this. As noted, the narration of events whose temporal order is significant endows their narration with ‘a natural principle of coherence, one that enables the narrator to construct his presentation sequence … according to the logic of progression inherent in the line or chain of events itself; from earlier to later’; by contrast, and significantly for the analysis to be undertaken here, ‘the descriptive sequence’ is denied ‘any natural resource of coherence’.Footnote ²⁵

More recently, the study of discourse modes, a linguistically inspired method of analysis, has emerged in parallel to the study of text-types.Footnote ²⁶ The key insight animating this enterprise is that several features of the surface text preponderate in – or are understood to be the hallmark of – narrative or descriptive portions of text.Footnote ²⁷ We may note three features.

First, verb forms. Tense-aspect in particular has long been recognized as ‘the most important distinctive linguistic feature’ associated with each of the text-types or discourse modes.Footnote ²⁸ Reflecting the fact that narration is usually defined in connection with the notion of the event, the aorist and historical present are often intimately associated with narration; so, too, as we shall see, is the future tense when the narrative takes the form of a ‘prior narration’.Footnote ²⁹ Person and mood also prove significant: description does not use the second person or the imperative mood, both of which can be found in narration.

Second, the notion that the underlying progression of the text is temporal in narration and inherently unordered in description has a correlate at the surface level of the text. This can be seen from two perspectives: from the perspective of the story and from the perspective of the plot. On the one hand, narrative portions of a text usually progress along with time in the story world; on the other, the passage of time in the story-world is most commonly expressed through, or recorded by, a sequence of narration. By contrast, movement through a descriptive passage does not necessarily suggest the passage of time in the story-world, nor does the passage of time in the story-world necessarily register in passages of description.Footnote ³⁰

Third, textual progression is often marked by temporal adverbs (or combinations of temporal adverbs and specific particles) in the case of high-narrativity portions of text. On the other hand, spatial adverbs (or combinations of spatial adverbs and specific particles) predominate in high-descriptivity sections.Footnote ³¹

So much for narration and description. What of argument? In fact, typologies of ‘argument’ are much harder to produce. There are three obstacles. First, the topic is under-researched, and analysts of discourse modes or text-types have simply not devoted much attention to differentiating ‘argument’ from ‘description’ or ‘narration’.Footnote ³² Second, in cases where analysts have undertaken this task, their definitions of ‘argument’ are usually so inextricably bound up in a formal, modern understanding of what constitutes an argument that it is difficult to apply such a category to a pre-Aristotelian text like the Homeric poems.Footnote ³³ The third stems from Parmenides’ own role in developing argument (and, specifically, extended deductive argument) and the fact that he is a key point of transition in the forms that an argument might take. Since this very transition is the central topic under investigation here, as noted in the Introduction, deciding what constitutes an ‘argument’ without already assuming the accomplishment of the phenomenon whose development we are attempting to observe is a problem.

For the purposes of this project, I shall consider a portion of text to instantiate an ‘argument’ discourse mode if it is formed of a cluster of statements that are linked inferentially; that is, if it is formed of a cluster of statements some of which explicitly provide a justification or rationale for others.Footnote ³⁴ At the surface level of the text, argument sections will be particularly densely populated by conditional clausesFootnote ³⁵ or purpose clauses, which tease out the implications of certain actions or justify pieces of instruction, and by specific usesFootnote ³⁶ of epeiFootnote ³⁷ and garFootnote ³⁸ (to be examined in further detail below).

3.1.3 A-B-C Patterns, and Types of Dependence

Some long-standing conversations in Homeric scholarship, particularly classic studies on catalogues and battle scenes, provide important parallels for the notion of a ‘type of dependence’.Footnote ³⁹ In the Catalogue of Ships, for example, every entry is organized in relation to (a) ‘nation/generals’, (b) ‘places’, (c) ‘number of ships’;Footnote ⁴⁰ in some instances, further genealogical background for key protagonists is provided.Footnote ⁴¹ These categories can also be examined under a more general typology where anecdotes supplement the ‘basic information’ (e.g. names and places in the Catalogue of Ships) with biographical information, while ‘contextual information’ offers ‘what is relevant to the context’ in which the list occurs.Footnote ⁴²

Somewhat more recently, Egbert Bakker has suggested that the so-called A-B-C pattern detailed above is the product of an oral compositional technique that operates through a process of ‘framing’ and ‘goal-setting’:Footnote ⁴³ the basic information demarcates the frame of vision and ‘orients’ listeners as to the future direction of the text.Footnote ⁴⁴ Detail ‘added’ to the ‘frame’ ‘lends depth and significance’ to the goal, which is the event presented.Footnote ⁴⁵ By means of this repeated pattern of elements, the epic narrator opens up narrative space, provides direction, and intensifies the experience of listeners.Footnote ⁴⁶

I shall argue in Section 3.2 below and in Chapter 4 that the rhetorical schema governed by the figure of the hodos makes available a framework of relationships between discursive units (i.e. its own distinctive ‘type of dependence’) that operates in a manner closely paralleling the A-B-C pattern and Bakker’s elaborations on it.Footnote ⁴⁷ This framework need not be exploited but is available to be activated any time the figure of the hodos is mobilized, as Circe’s two long speeches in Odyssey 10 and 12 make clear.

3.1.4 Catalogues

Discussion of the A-B-C pattern brings us to one final topic of Homeric scholarship that needs to be addressed: the notion of catalogic discourse. A great deal has been said about this topic, its relationship to oral composition, the development of epic narrative forms, and its cognitive functions and their place in a society that is either preliterate or largely so.Footnote ⁴⁸ Scholars have discussed three principles of catalogic discourse that are pertinent in this setting: that there is some kind of underlying classificatory rubric according to which catalogued items merit inclusion in the catalogue;Footnote ⁴⁹ that these items form the entries – often specifically delimited by ‘entry headings’ – that make up the catalogue;Footnote ⁵⁰ and that these entries are enumerated sequentially.Footnote ⁵¹

It is this final point that will prove the most crucial for the remainder of this chapter, and indeed much of the remainder of this book. How are the entries to be ordered? There may seem to be two extremes. On the one hand is the list: ‘a list presents items that are more than one in number … and have something to do with each other; but quite unlike narrative, the order of its items may be reversible or subject to free transpositions … the actual order of entries need not follow any scheme or have any obvious significance.’Footnote ⁵² On the other hand is what we might call a series, where the order of the items catalogued is not reversible or subject to free transpositions but is strictly determined according to some rule or principle. An example of a Homeric list would be the catalogue of Nereids at Il. 18.38–49; is there any sense that it matters whether or not Glauke comes first, Amatheia last, and Doto and Proto in the middle? By contrast, an archetypal epic series can be found at lines 133–53 of Hesiod’s Theogony (or even the parthenogenic portion at lines 126–32). There is simply no question of Gaia coming after, say, Cronus or the Cyclopes (or even the mountains or Pontus): because she begets them, she must plainly precede them.

3.2.1 Catalogues: Constituting the Field of Statements

Understanding the discursive architecture governed by the figure of the hodos as a kind of catalogic discourse requires us to address three features of catalogues. First, catalogic discourse both demarcates the boundaries of a kind of closed set and structures the field of statements it encompasses in such a way as to facilitate the process of classification.Footnote ⁵⁵ By grouping together a bundle of discrete entities – be they places, individuals, objects – within a single, unifying framework, catalogic discourse organizes the terrain of the field of statements in such a way as to suggest (or, from another perspective, presuppose) a kind of underlying conceptual unity that encompasses the items enumerated.Footnote ⁵⁶ Second, the catalogic form can articulate the individual items it enumerates as discrete items by framing each entity as an ‘entry’ (with, furthermore, a particular quality that grants it membership in the catalogic set).Footnote ⁵⁷ Third, by unifying in a single set the discrete entities it enumerates, the catalogic mode of discourse in general makes it possible to indicate the entire set and its component entities in a single shorthand.

An example may help illuminate these points. Unlike the later routes that traverse the fabulous spaces of the Apologoi, the journey Athena maps out in Odyssey 1 remains squarely within the bounds of the ordinary Greek world and is therefore perhaps the simplest, least elaborate journey spelled out in the Odyssey.Footnote ⁵⁸ We discussed above (Section 1.2) the moment Athena sets the plot of books 1–4 in motion by proposing to Telemachus that he (Od. 1.284–91):

The sequential enumeration of the items – Pylos, Sparta, native land (Ithaca) – is evident. The lexical items that demarcate the entries and articulate the specific items, the pair ἐς and -δε (discussed above in Section 1.2), are equally clear. The underlying conceptual unity established across these items is a more complex question.Footnote ⁵⁹

Third, the itinerary, with its clear point of origin (where we are now: in this case, Ithaca) and its precisely identified final destination (νοστήσας … ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν), determines the boundary markers of a closed set, one that encompasses Ithaca, Pylos, Sparta (and Ithaca again). As a result of being fused into a single unit, the entire ordered sequence of places can be intensively summarized by the single word hodos (instead of requiring that each destination be listed extensively). Here the scene in book 1 proves particularly illustrative: two hundred lines and an afternoon’s worth of arguments with the suitors after Athena set the Telemachy into motion, we find Telemachus in his private chambers (Od. 1.443–44):

As a kind of catalogue, the hodos-itinerary marks out the boundaries of a category or the limits of a set. In the course of doing so it creates a distinct unit, the constituent elements of which can be summarized or indexed as a unit or as a bundle of different elements.

3.2.3 Rhetorical Schemata and Types of Dependence: A Temporally Ordered Sequence of Places as a Framework for Description

That is not all, however. The story is more complex. So, too, is the first hodos that Circe delineates for Odysseus, the one we find in Odyssey 10. It may take no special knowledge to sign out the path from Ithaca to the mansions of Nestor and Menelaus on the familiar terrain of the Peloponnese; what emerges there is the significance of the sequence in which these visits are ordered. The same is not true of the route from Aeaea to the Underworld – for, as Odysseus laments, ‘no man has ever yet travelled to Hades in a black ship’ (Od. 10.502). Circe gives the following set of directions in response (Od. 10.505–16):

In this passage, we see on display the hallmarks of the discursive structure governed by the hodos: a bounded range of places ordered sequentially (the end of Ocean and the fertile shore; the hinterlands of Hades; the confluence of Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus into Acheron and rock) in a unified set. This sequence is dictated by a narrative framework, one in which movement through space in time imparts a specific order to the sequences: (first, depart from here), then, when (ὁπότε) you have crossed the ocean you will find a thickly wooded shore, then from there go to the rock/confluence of Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus; then … etc.Footnote ⁶⁹

We may, however, note two important points, one concerning the level of rhetorical schemata, the other the level of types of dependence. At the level of rhetorical schemata, we have seen that it is movement through space in time that imparts the specific shape to the order of the items sequenced by the hodos as catalogic discourse. But this example urges us to take proper account of the fact that this is movement through space in time, and to pinpoint the ways this spatial dimension exerts its own influence on the possibilities for ordering the items that make up the catalogue of a hodos-itinerary. In the hodos to the Underworld, the scarcity of any temporal indicators imposing a temporal sequence on the catalogue at the level of the text brings out the underlying order inherent in the enumerated items themselves. Not only are both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of the pattern by which the hodos orders its sequence distinct and irreducible one to the other, but this spatial dimension is topological: that is, we understand space here from the perspective of the spatially contiguous, rather than absolute Cartesian space.Footnote ⁷⁰

Let us consolidate observations made so far at the level of rhetorical schemata. Crucially, the rhetorical schema of the hodos has a fundamental narrativity insofar as what it depicts are events or actions, and, characteristically, the sequence of these actions or events is significant. The order in which these events or actions are sequenced in turn depends on two parameters. The underlying geography of the space traversed – specifically, the contiguity of the places where events or actions occur – determines the matrix of possible combinations this sequence can take. Movement through this space in time in turn determines one sequence or imposes a clear shape and form on the set of possibilities determined by the underlying geography of the space traversed. That is, the hodos dictates a series insofar as, by adding a dimension of ordered temporal sequentiality, it generates what we might strategically call spatio-temporal con-sequence out of spatial contiguity.

At the surface level of discourse these features are reflected in a number of characteristic ways in the Homeric examples so far examined. First, the verbs linking the units ordered by the rhetorical schema of the hodos are in some combination of the aorist tense-aspect (as one would expect with events and actions), the imperative mood, and the second person. Second, the combinations of adverbs and particles indicate the progression of the text according to a sequential pattern (and, especially in the hodos described in Odyssey 1, a largely temporally determined sequence). But this is because, third, the progression of the text tracks the sequence of the underlying story, which is itself ordered according to a temporal progression through spatially contiguous locations.

The second major point, pertaining to the level of the ‘types of dependence’, is as follows. There is a subtle but significant shift between the items enumerated by Athena to Telemachus and those enumerated by Circe to Odysseus. In the first case, we found a series of place names – ‘Pylos’, ‘Sparta’ – marked out as entries by the lexical tags ἐς or -δε. In the hodos to Hades a similar tag, ἔνθα, designates ‘entries’ in the catalogue, too. This is quite important, given that toponyms seem hard to come by in the Underworld. In this wilderness bereft of proper names, some other means of designating a place must be found: a rock, a confluence of rivers, a grove.

Somewhere between the thickly wooded shore and Persephone’s grove (and the tall poplars, and the fruit-perishing willows), between the rock and Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus, we find ourselves edging away from narrative discourse towards descriptive discourse. This is not only because of the highly conspicuous substitution of the sequence of temporal adverbs πρῶτα, κεῖθεν, ἔπειτα by the tripartite anaphora of the primarily spatial adverb ἔνθα at lines 509, 513, 515;Footnote ⁷¹ the passage is equally rich with verbs in the omnitemporal present (ῥέουσιν, 513; ἐστιν, 514; along with unexpressed existential predicates at 509–10 and 515).

The second entry in Circe’s hodos-catalogue thus blossoms into a discursive mode fully marked by ‘high descriptivity’ characteristics. We find a series of pieces of information about what the story-world is like, a set of attributions that constitute subtheme-like items in relation to themes (theme ‘Cocytus’, subtheme ‘which is an off-break from the water of the Styx’), a listing of states of affairs that is the stock in trade of description and all the grammatical features that attend this function discussed above.

To recapitulate: even without any express signalling of the temporal dimension ordering the items sequenced by a hodos, the discursive mode governed by this hodos is still marked by a kind of narrativity thanks to the inherent significance of the temporal sequence of the events it encompasses. Second, it is not only this temporal dimension that defines the order in which the hodos sequences its items: the inherent geography and topology of the spatial items it enumerates plays a fundamental role in dictating the set of possible combinations that form the series of the ordered sequence of the hodos. Third, at the level of ‘types of dependence’, the ‘entry’ component of the catalogic framework creates a regular (in the sense of both ‘orderly’ and ‘repeated’) opportunity for interludes of descriptive discourse that present states of affairs, introduce objects and places and attribute qualities to them, and are marked by the linguistic features characteristic of description (spatial adverbs and verbs in the omnitemporal present, perfect, etc.).

3.2.4 Types of Dependence: Narrative Episodes Tied to Places

One final point must be addressed before moving to the more consequential of Circe’s two hodoi. Continuing with the passage above, we find (Od. 10.513–20):

While it is interesting to note how the ‘tag’ ἔνθα is used at line 515 to make the pivot from description-oriented discourse to narratively oriented discourse, the temporal adverb (μετέπειτα) and ordinal language (πρῶτα, τὸ τρίτον) clearly indicate the inherent significance of the ordering of events that is the hallmark of high-narrativity discourse. As we shall discuss at much greater length in the next chapter, the imperative mood here expresses the sequence of actions that constitute the narrative; this highly narrative level nested within a highly descriptive one, which is itself nested in the narratively sequenced catalogue of the hodos, often takes this verbal form in the Odyssey.Footnote ⁷² Furthermore, as the use of the imperative mood (in dashed underline), the use of the vocative, and the second person markers suggests, this level of discourse is used to convey instructions specifically pegged to the places that make up the catalogue entry and are described in the ensuing description section: we may therefore be more specific and call this level of dependence: ‘instruction’ (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 The figure of the hodos in Odyssey 10

4.1.1 Rhetorical Schema of the hodos

What does the analysis set out in the previous chapter mean for Circe’s second hodos, the one she details in Odyssey 12? The overarching task of this chapter will be to analyse Od. 12.39–141 using the tools introduced and the framework developed in the Chapter 3.

The dramatic scenario in which Circe spells out this hodos is well-known. Odysseus has returned from the Underworld to attend to the bones of the hapless Elpenor. But he is also, from a narrative perspective, still empty-handed; Tiresias has not in fact provided the directions home that Odysseus needs, and it therefore falls to Circe to designate the actual itinerary of his journey home.Footnote ¹ She greets the returning voyagers with characteristic hospitality, and then, dispatching the ship’s crew, pledges to Odysseus: ‘I shall indicate the hodos and sign out each [of the road-marks]’ (αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ δείξω ὁδὸν ἠδὲ ἕκαστα σημανέω, Od. 12.25–26).Footnote ² With a minimum of preliminaries, she then launches into the business of doing just this.

In fact, in the catalogic discourse that follows (Od. 12.27–141), we find precisely what our study of the hodos enumerated by Athena to Telemachus in Odyssey 1 would lead us to expect. There, we saw that: (a) the temporal adverbs and particle combinations πρῶτα μὲν … κεῖθεν δὲ … δὴ ἔπειτα enumerated entries in the catalogue of the hodos-itinerary; (b) the sequence of this discursive enumeration tracked the underlying movement in the story-world from destination to destination to be undertaken in the future by Telemachus; (c) the destinations themselves were marked by the lexical items -δε and εἰς; and (d) the events that made up the core of the narrative were expressed in verbs in the aorist, often in the imperative mood (and in the second person). What we find in Odyssey 12 is fundamentally the same constellation of features, though with a few small modifications; for example, the second person imperatives have been replaced by second person futures. Circe begins (Od. 12.39):

And introduces the Cattle of the Sun (Od. 12.127):

Between these moments, a section introduced by the following lines intervenes immediately after the Sirens episode ends (Od. 12.55–58):

Here, too, the textual progression along temporal lines is marked through the cluster αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν δή. The sequence of the textual progression and the sequence of places to be visited in the voyage are correlated with the story-world that Circe narrates to Odysseus: the ‘what place comes next on the hodos’ (ἔνθα) is coordinated with the ‘what comes next in the narration’ (ἔπειτα διηνεκέως ἀγορεύσω).

This is as we would expect from the rhetorical schema governed by the figure of the hodos. We will in due course be able to examine the portion where Circe presents the choice. First, however, and by way of clarifying the patterns that define the other two discursive units (which will then give us a framework for examining the portion where the choice can be found), we will move to the level of types of dependence to examine how the discursive units marked out by this constellation of adverb and particle clusters, tense-aspect-mood-person configurations, and the relationship between narrated movement through space and discursive patterning are organized internally: that is, at the level of dependence.

4.1.2 Levels of Dependence

4.2.1 Rhetorical Schemata

If analysing Od. 12.39–54 and 12.127–41 can be done rather neatly, how best to analyse the different units that make up Od. 12.55–126 is more challenging. De Jong’s commentary, generally a reliable starting point, is misleading or inaccurate in a number of ways when it comes to this passage. For example, lines 12.108–10 and 124–26 are inexplicably assigned to Charybdis, not Scylla; the first half of line 12.73 addresses not only Scylla, but both Scylla and Charybdis; lines 12.81b–82 are plainly not descriptive.Footnote ²⁴ One suspects that these uncharacteristic inaccuracies stem from de Jong’s decision to use the individual characters or places – viz. the Sirens, the Planctae, Scylla, Charybdis, Thrinacia – as the base units (‘episodes’) of her analysis. While this is appropriate for the Sirens (12.39–54) and Thrinacia (12.127–41), where the segmentation of the text (that is, of the narrative or plot) corresponds to the discrete places where Odysseus will arrive, in lines 12.55–126 something else is going on.

Figure 4.1 Preliminary analysis: Discursive organization governed by the figure of the hodos in Odyssey 12

As noted, Od. 12.55–58 fits the model of ‘prior narration’, the top unit in the levels of dependence:

Two recent studies on autar and autar + epei/epeita/epēn have made clear how these clusters of what are traditionally classed as particles and conjunctions are better understood as discourse markers that help speakers organize their discourse by parcelling it into distinct units.Footnote ²⁵ Applying their findings to this portion of the Odyssey, we may say that αὐτὰρ ἐπήν would here mark the beginning of a new narration section. Similarly, we find typical markers of narrative activity, including three verbs in the future indicative ἀγορεύσω, ἐρέω, and ἔσσεται.Footnote ²⁶ The cluster ἔπειτα διηνεκέως also marks the progression of the text along temporal lines. All the features of narration discussed above are in play here.

By contrast, very few of these narrative elements are found in 12.59–126. Instead, we find extensive stretches of description (to be examined shortly) introduced by the portentous phrase (Od. 12.57–58):

These two hodoi, both of which she promises to enumerate, in fact introduce what amounts to 47.5 lines (12.59–106a) of description; verbs in this portion of the text overwhelmingly take the omnitemporal present, and nearly all the adverbs used are spatial (e.g. enthen at 12.59; entha at 12.85; tēi [‘past there’] at 12.62, 12.66; tōi [‘in that place’] at 12.103, 12.104). The text proceeds along largely spatial lines, with little movement in ‘story’ time (barring one important exception, which we shall note shortly).Footnote ²⁷ The function of these portions is clearly to introduce elements of the story-world and attribute qualities and attributes to them.

One major exception is a curiously ambiguous line and a half of plainly narrative language occurring at 12.81b–82, just after the first of the ‘two rocks’ (viz. Scylla’s rock) is introduced (Od. 12.80–82):

As the commentators note, ἰθύνετε is an aorist subjunctive; when combined with the ἄν in the environment of a prophecy, this has the force of something approaching a command.Footnote ²⁹

What are we to make of this? Lines 81b–82 (ᾗ … Ὀδυσσεῦ) plainly cannot be designated as descriptive (as de Jong would have it): the textual features are not those of description, neither establishing features of the narrative world nor attributing qualities to the characters that populate it. Depending on how one interprets the force of the subjunctive + an construction in the context of a prophecy, this could either be a prior narration section, which would introduce a new unit, or an instruction section, which would close off an old unit, according to the analysis we have been undertaking so far (see Figure 4.2 below). Perhaps in this setting, however, the ambiguity is useful. We might do well to see the clause that spans the two lines as doing double duty: as instruction, it closes off the section that, as we shall see, details a choice between the two ‘routes’, while as prior narration it opens a new kind of textual or discursive unit in which the two creatures, Scylla and Charybdis, are presented in high-descriptivity passages followed by instruction/argument (12.106b–10) concerning how best to address them.

Figure 4.2 Analysis of Od. 12.39–141 by discourse-unit, hodos-unit, and episode

A version of de Jong’s schema modified to take these points into account might look like Table 4.2. On this reading, we can identify three possible units of analysis. The first would be discursive units, units of discourse parcelled out or marked off as discrete items by discourse markers on the surface of the text (clusters of adverbs and particles, here in combination with prior narration introducing the new unit and following a section of instruction closing the old units); these would be distinctions made at the level of discourseFootnote ³⁰ and would here be coextensive with entries in the catalogue of Circe’s hodos-itinerary (capitalized in Table 4.2). These units we may contrast with what we may still, following convention, call episodes, which would correspond to all the locations Circe mentions, regardless of whether she actually instructs Odysseus to visit them;Footnote ³¹ these episodes may revolve around particular characters (e.g. the Sirens) but they are ultimately tied to specific places (which number five, underlined in Table 4.2, and would include the Planctae and Charybdis (rejected by Circe)). Finally, we can identify a third category between these two, what we might call a ‘hodos-unit’, which marks out a distinct node in the itinerary (based on the analysis of the level of dependence undertaken so far) that makes up the hodos enumerated in the catalogic discourse of Circe’s prophecy. This level may be seen to bridge the underlying story-world and the level of discourse by capturing the way elements in the story-world are organized by discourse (these number four, in boldface in Table 4.2).

It is this level of analysis, the hodos-unit (see Table 4.3), that will provide the basis for the following discussion; breaking things down in this fashion allows us to glean a better insight into the two passages where choices are presented (12.57–82; 81–110, 115–26) and, by helping us better discern the shape of Circe’s hodos, help us better analyse the discursive dynamics through which it is expressed. How, then, does this work in practice?

As we have seen, Circe disclaims the ability to instruct Odysseus, telling him she will present two options between which he must choose (12.57–58):

The first of these two (and both ὁπποτέρη and ἀμφοτέρωθεν underscore the duality of the choice) is presented by lines beginning ἔνθεν μὲν γὰρFootnote ³² πέτραι ἐπηρεφέες (‘There on the one hand [are] steep rocks’, 12.59). Notable is the spatial preposition enthen and the particle men, which open the door to an extended description of these steep rocks (12.59–72). The men is matched by the corresponding οἱ δὲ δύω σκόπελοι (‘And on the other [are] the two rocks’, 12.73), which in turn heads another portion of description (12.73–81a) where the first of these rocks is presented.

Scrupulous symmetries characterize the two items presented in the harmonized balance of the men … de … clauses, as Hopman puts it:

In Bakker’s view, as a general matter in Homer, the use of men ensures that the option introduced by the de clause is ‘framed’ in relation to the option in the men clause.Footnote ³⁴ This ‘framing’ need not set up an antithetical relationship: ‘[a] speaker using men, looking forward to an upcoming statement with de, does not so much presuppose a common basis for conducting discourse as establish one’.Footnote ³⁵

Whereas units of discourse are mapped onto places one-to-one in the Sirens and Thrinacia episodes, in the course of the hodos-unit formed by the narration-description-instruction section spanning lines 12.57–82 we find two different geographic units, the Planctae and the Two Rocks. They are not introduced at the level of the narrative frame (the top level of dependence), but rather form two different entries placed in parallel at the second level of dependence, that of description.

Precisely the same dynamics are to be found in the course of lines Od. 12.73–106a, which relate Scylla and Charybdis to each other and describe them. The two are presented through a men … de … framing device (for Scylla’s rock: ὁ μὲν οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἱκάνει | ὀξείῃ κορυφῇ at 12.73–74; for Charybdis: τὸν δ᾽ ἕτερον σκόπελον χθαμαλώτερον at 12.101)Footnote ³⁶ at the level of description rather than narration.Footnote ³⁷ What follows (Od. 12.73b–81a, 12.83–106a) is an extended description addressing the first option and then the second, the details of which are closely coordinated.Footnote ³⁸ There is also one final point: an advantage of this line of analysis is that the hodos-units do not map one-to-one onto ‘episodes’; as the confusion surrounding lines 73–81a make clear, it is entirely possible for one discrete place or character – Scylla and her rock, in this case – to be split across two different hodos-units in a way that analysing by episode does not allow for.

By way of linking the foregoing discussion to existing scholarship on ancient Greek thought, and also to pinpointing what makes this portion of the Odyssey distinctive, it is helpful to discuss these points in light of the Homeric phenomenon that Geoffrey Lloyd termed ‘polar expressions’, with which the relationship between the Planctae and the Two Rocks, and between Scylla and Charybdis, may seem to have much in common.Footnote ³⁹ As Lloyd emphasizes, however, the unit that forms one half of a ‘polar expression’ can also often be paired with other units to form a ‘polar expression’ along a different axis; so, for example, ‘openly’ can be contrasted with either ‘secretly’ (ἢ ἀμφαδὸν ἦε κρυφηδόν, Od. 14.330) or ‘by trickery’ (ἠὲ δόλῳ ἢ ἀμφαδόν, Od. 1.296).Footnote ⁴⁰ Furthermore, these polar opposites often admit of a third, intermediate option (or even a gradation of intermediate options): so soldiers need not be only either brave or cowardly, but can also be somewhere in between (μεσήεις, Il. 12.269).Footnote ⁴¹ By contrast, however, and very importantly, neither hodos of the two paired by Circe admit of another contrary to be substituted, as with ‘openly/hidden’ and ‘openly/secretly’. No ‘third hodos’ is presented – nor does the possibility seem conceivable, unless one can rewrite the geography of the story-world. It is not only that one cannot travel both routes at the same time; it is also simply that, as presented, there do not exist any other possible routes if one wants to get from the Sirens’ Meadow to Thrinacia. That the two hodoi are part of the physical space of the story-world is central not only to their mutual exclusiveness but also, that is, to the exhaustive nature of the dichotomy they form; as a convenient shorthand, we may also refer to this phenomenon of the exclusive exhaustive disjunction (where one cannot choose both options, or neither, but must choose one) between the two paths of a forked road as a krisis. The krisis will be a feature of enormous importance in Parmenides’ poem.

With this analysis in hand, we can now identify a second kind of operation in the syntax of the hodos as a form of catalogic discourse. The focus has been on the ordered sequentiality according to which items form entries in the series of the catalogic discourse organized by the figure of the hodos (see Table 4.4a, b, c). In the exclusive disjunction or krisis, we see a second possible relationship that can obtain between two items of a hodos-itinerary within one unit of hodos-discourse, one that relates these two items in the story-world at the level of description, not narration.

4.2.2 Types of Dependence: Description and Argument in the krisis Section

This has implications at the level of types of dependence for sections of text that depend from the entries that make up the catalogue of the hodos. Compared to Od. 12.39–54 and 12.127–41, however, the dynamics of lines Od. 12.55–126 are subtly but critically distinct. Since in lines 12.55–126 it is the places themselves – as opposed to actions (e.g. to kill or not to kill the Cattle of the Sun) – that form the possible choices in question, in the scenario of the krisis it is the nature of the places themselves (as opposed to the actions one can or cannot perform there) that now commands the narrator’s attention. The places themselves must be adequately described in order that a choice between them may be made. As a result, in lines Od. 59–126, description predominates to a far greater extent than in other sections: in the Sirens episode the portions are virtually even (7.5 lines of description to 8 lines of argument), while in the Thrinacia episode we find a description to argument ratio of nearly 2:1 (9.5 lines to 5) – between lines 12.59 and 126, however, the ratio stands at nearly 6:1 (52 lines of description to 9 of instruction/argument).Footnote ⁴²

This is significant, especially given the view that oral poetry is good at, and its linguistic resources designed for, ‘describ[ing] the acts of persons and the happening of events’, but offers few means of examining the world beyond ‘verbs of doing and acting and happening’.Footnote ⁴³ On this view, even when the language of oral poetry is mobilized to gain purchase on ‘the nature of the outside world’, its orientation towards the expression of actions and events inclines it strongly towards doing so ‘in diachronic terms, as history rather than as philosophy or science’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The encounter with the Sirens and the passage by way of Thrinacia are, for geographical reasons, simply givens. Circe flatly declares that Odysseus ‘will first reach the Sirens’ (12.39). This certainty lets Circe get on straight away to ‘what matters’, which is what these Sirens do: they enchant (12.40). There is simply no need to further explore their underlying nature, their ontological status, their genealogy, their form (even their number).Footnote ⁴⁵ Regarding Thrinacia, whether or not Odysseus and his men make land there is partly what is at stake in Tiresias’ prophecy in book 11. Circe elides the question, however, simply listing it as the next place Odysseus ‘will reach’ in the sequence of his travels; what ‘matters’ for Circe is the question of the cattle. The element of choice in this section perhaps accounts for the increased proportion of description relative to instruction: because what matters is the cattle (concerning whose fate there is to be a kind of choice), information about them – about their nature and their histories – is important. Not only is it what the cattle do that ‘matters’ here; what they are becomes more important.

This relationship between the introduction of a choice and the proliferation of description comes dramatically into view in the portion of Circe’s hodos presented by lines 12.59–126. Without the simple givenness that defines the encounters with the Sirens and Thrinacia (viz. that there would be an encounter with the Sirens or the Cattle of the Sun), the nature of the possible destinations in the hodos-itinerary are ‘what matter’. Accordingly, what we find is something akin to ‘describing the setting for its own sake’ here: what ‘matters’ is the very nature of the potential items making up Odysseus’ itinerary, and what will form the ‘argument’ sections is, in part, an argument about which of the two exclusive, exhaustive alternatives forming the krisis to select, and why. It is to some notable aspects of these description and argument sections, and to the relationship between the two, that we shall now turn.

4.2.3 Krisis: Assessments and Cautions

What we see, then, is a remarkable coalescence of (a) the three linguistic features we have so far been discussing within (b) the framework of the type of dependence we have so far sketched out (see Section 4.2.2) involving (c) one of the two possibilities of the rhetorical schema of the hodos (viz. an exclusive, exhaustive disjunction, or krisis). Key features (often expressed through a predicative esti and/or a modally charged negation) of characters introduced (often with an existential esti) in the course of extraordinarily lengthy, well-developed description sections establish basic states of affairs; these in turn go on to serve as the evidence on the basis of which (a relationship articulated, as suggested by Knudsen, by gar or epei) Circe’s instruction (which is thus also the conclusion of an inferential process) is supported in the instruction/argument section that follows. This process in turn proceeds according to Gill’s pattern of working through the implications of a course (no longer only of action, but now a physical course in the sense of cursus). What is more, this plays out within the context of the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction formed by a fork in the physical hodos and, paired with the modally charged negations introduced in the description sections, amounts to a ‘proscription-by-negation’ rendering one option strictly impassable and impossible, which thus forces, implicitly or explicitly, her male mortal charge to choose the alternative path.

What does this mean for Parmenides? Much in the preceding paragraph should sound arrestingly familiar to scholars of Parmenides’ poem. Evaluating the nature and significance of the overlaps between the features of Odyssey 12.55–126 explored in this last section and Parmenides’ poem (to be explored in Chapter 5 below) is a delicate task, however – and not least because these involve similarities of different kinds and at different scales, and these in turn differ considerably in their degree of closeness or markedness. In some cases, we may feel we can advance claims with considerable confidence; in others, definitive answers will be in short supply. There can be no debating the extremely high degree of commonality between the scenario described in preceding paragraph and, as we shall explore in the next chapter, in parts of Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’. By contrast, regarding the use of esti, or gar and epei, we might be content to note the striking similarities without feeling compelled to make firmer, or unduly grandiose, claims.

Three factors should be considered when assessing these aspects of the relationship between Parmenides and Od.12.55–126. The first concerns how distinctive the features in question are to Od.12.55–126. The second concerns how close or precise the overlaps between Odyssey 12 and Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ are.Footnote ⁶² The third concerns the Parmenidean side of the ledger: to what extent is Parmenides’ own intellectual agenda likely to be the driving force behind the specificities of his usage, rather than the particular features of the Homeric text he inherited?Footnote ⁶³ In the remainder of the chapter, I shall consider the first and (more briefly) the third points; the second (and, again rather briefly, the third) will be discussed at length in the following two chapters, particularly Chapter 5.

The second half of this chapter has been devoted to examining how the forks in the hodos at Od. 12.55–126 play out at the levels of rhetorical schemata and types of dependence. But are these forks really so distinctive? Early archaic Greek poetry furnishes a pair of celebrated instances where a similar image is leveraged to great effect, Hesiod’s Works and Days 213–18 and 287–92. Nor was Parmenides alone in making use of this image in the late archaic period; the presumed influence of these two passages from Hesiod on Theognis 911–14 has often been discussed.Footnote ⁶⁴ So is this not simply a stock image?Footnote ⁶⁵

To this mix some scholars have also been tempted to add the texts inscribed on a dozen or so gold tablets (sometimes dubbed ‘Orphic’) discovered in tombs across Magna Graecia, some of which seem to have suggestive points of overlap with Parmenides’ poem.Footnote ⁶⁶ Do these tablets not also provide directions for travelling a hodos traversing the BeyondFootnote ⁶⁷ – perhaps even one where some sort of a fork in the road must be confronted?Footnote ⁶⁸ Are not the set of religious and eschatological associations conjured by this itinerary no less suggestive, no less potent (and perhaps even more so) than the social or ethical ones conjured by Hesiod’s hodoi in Works and Days?

To be sure, some of the similarities between parts of Parmenides’ poem and Hesiod’s crossroads or the golden tablets are indeed evocative. And, as will be clear from the Introduction, I am strongly in favour of any readings of Parmenides’ poem that can help relocate him more firmly in his time, place, and poetic and sociocultural context. Similarly, it is not at all my goal to advocate for a single-mindedly Homeric reading of Parmenides, one that claims for Homer a monopoly on influencing Parmenides to the exclusion of all other forms of archaic poetic, cultural, and religious life. Far from it. But from the perspective of Parmenides’ place in the history of thought, there are nevertheless crucial differences between lines 12.55–126 of the Odyssey and the two passages of Hesiod (and archaic epigone) just cited or the texts of the gold tablets recovered from various sites in Magna Graecia. It is to these latter we must now turn.

First, in the golden tablets, unlike in Odyssey 12, when the possibility of taking more than one path emerges, there is no interest whatsoever in arguing for – or against – a specific selection. Rather, one simply receives a one-line injunction along the lines of, for example, ‘Do not even go near this spring!’ (ταύτᾶς τᾶς κράνας μēδὲ σχεδὸν ἐνγύθεν ἔλθēις, GJ 1 = Edmonds B10), before the instructions continue on (space is at a premium on a gold tablet, one might think, and the important thing is just to make the right choice, not to prove the merits of choosing one way or the other).Footnote ⁶⁹ Since my interest is in understanding Parmenides’ development of extended deductive argumentation and the constitutive elements of demonstration, this is a very important point.

On the other hand, the diversion towards the lake and the white cypress is, one presumes, a genuine feature of the physical landscape (however this might be understood by initiates). What is more, it is hard to imagine that a deceased mortal, initiated or otherwise, might try to reject the two options available and instead advocate the merits of fashioning some kind of third, alternative route or course of action. In this, some tablets are indeed like Odyssey 12.55–126. By contrast, Hesiod’s conceptualization of qualities like hybris and dikē, kakotēs and aretē Footnote ⁷⁰ by mapping them onto an imagined spatial domain, and then figuring a dichotomy between them via the apparently exclusive, exhaustive disjunction of a forked path, does not change the fact that it leaves open an entire terrain of potential responses. As Lloyd pointed out, even in the context of traditional polar expressions, when these involve different ways of addressing a problem or articulating an ethical choice, there is always the possibility of elaborating a third option, be that a middle way or a new axis along which to construct the dichotomy.Footnote ⁷¹ Might not a resourceful Perses always have been able to respond that there is a third way between pure hybris and pure dikē, pure kakotēs and pure aretē? Or could he not transpose the problem to a different landscape, a pragmatic one, say, rather than an ethical one (or vice versa, depending on how one understands the meaning of aretē and kakotēs)?Footnote ⁷² Odysseus (and an initiate travelling the route from the golden tablet), however, is stuck in the physical world as it is; there is no option for him to invent some unthought of third way to Thrinacia between Scylla and Charybdis, or to transpose himself to a differently configured map.

Furthermore, it is extremely telling that we see no hint of any kind of modal charge to the negations in either Works and Days or the golden tablets. That is precisely because the choices presented in both texts are in fact genuine choices. Indeed, in both Works and Days and the golden tablets, the conundrum – and thus the need for advice in the first place – lies in the fact that either route could be, and in fact routinely is, selected. One could very easily divert from one’s path forward by veering right to refresh oneself at the spring by the white cypress (as the imperfective participle suggests – cf. e.g. κατερχόμεναι (GJ 1=Edmonds B10) – the souls of the dead do so regularly). Equally, one could all too easily choose the route to kakotēs, to whose dwelling the hodos is short and smooth; that it is ever so much more inviting than the long, rough, steep path of aretē is precisely why one needs to be warned from it. There is no ‘proscription-by-negation’ in either the Works and Days or in the golden tablets because there could not be: in each case, the path one is advised against taking is simply the ordinary path that mortals, or their souls, do so often take. As we shall see, this difference between the hodoi enumerated by Circe (in which only one of the possibilities is truly viable at each krisis) and those we find in Hesiod and on the golden tablets is of the utmost importance for Parmenides and his invention of extended deductive argumentation and key features of demonstration.

There is another important pair of points to be made concerning the relationship between the itinerary Circe sketches out in Od. 12.55–126 and some similarities this shares with other cultural artefacts of the archaic (or, in the case of the golden tablets, the classical) era, be these the confronting of a crossroads, the navigation of a hodos through the Beyond, the use of a pattern of deliberation, or thinking in terms of polar opposites. While there are important points of overlap with Hesiod’s Works and Days 216–17 and 287–92, the golden tablets, and the texts analysed by Lloyd, Gill, and Knudsen, it happens that all the features that Odyssey 12.55–126 shares with one or another of the texts discussed coalesce in the hodos that Circe details in the same book. Just as neither the analyses of Gill and Knudsen nor Lloyd’s discussion of polar opposites implies that there is nothing unique in Circe’s particular use of the general structures that each scholar described, so we may observe that in Odyssey 12, it is not only that a hodos is presented which helps a mortal navigate the physical geography of some portion of the Beyond, as in the tablets – nor only that the crossroads imagery constructs a choice between two alternatives that come into their own as alternatives, as in Works and Days. Likewise, what we find in Odyssey 12 is not just another instantiation of a polar expression; nor is it just another instance of a deliberative process that considers alternatives only to eliminate one and select the other; nor is it just another use of road imagery in providing instructions for navigating the physical geography of an Elsewhere; nor is it just another example of the use of a forked path to articulate a dichotomy. Each aspect of Odyssey 12.55–126 that overlaps with the different expressions of archaic Greek culture surveyed above in fact reveals just how distinctive this portion of the Odyssey is.

Indeed, it is precisely this very confluence of these features in one passage that makes Odyssey 12.55–126 so distinctive and so valuable for Parmenides.Footnote ⁷³ The whole of this passage of Odyssey 12 is incomparably greater than the sum of its archaic Greek parts. That the dichotomous choice between courses of action is quite literally between physical courses (of action) creates an extraordinarily powerful tool – the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction or krisis – which, when combined with argumentative support for the route to be chosen (or rather, a modally charged argument strictly ruling out one possibility, and therefore requiring that the other be chosen), simply cannot be found in any of these features individually. As we have seen, Lloyd observes that in very many cases there is the possibility of elaborating a third option in a polar expression. In the golden tablets, there is no interest at all in examining the other route in the fashion described by Gill; it is simply a wrong turn one should avoid on the way to the Lake of Memory, and there is apparently no need to explore the possibility of going to this spring, to think through the consequences of this course (of action), to reject it in favour of another alternative. Nor is there any interest in providing an argumentatively pregnant justification for selecting the one route over the other. If, as we shall see in Chapter 5, what matters to Parmenides is having the ability to leverage a uniquely potent argumentative tool that forces a voyager down one route or the other, this is something that neither a generic ‘polar expression’ nor the topography of the afterlife, nor even the rhetorical device of Hesiod’s two hodoi, can offer. Rather, this is a distinctive feature of the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction formed by a choice between two physical routes, and two physical routes alone, when one must press forward (and so cannot take neither), when one has a body that cannot be divided (and so one cannot take both), and when, in the end, only of the routes is actually viable. What we find in Hesiod, the golden tablets, and in most of the examples discussed by Lloyd and Gill are in fact genuine choices; what we find in Circe’s hodos, and what we shall find in Parmenides, is an apparent choice that, upon further descriptive reflection and argumentation, is in fact no choice at all. And for Parmenides, for the emergence of demonstration (which must begin from a point that all accept and cannot be rejected), and for the Western tradition of thought defined by the kind of knowledge demonstration produces, that makes all the difference.

This much concerns largely (though not exclusively) the level of rhetorical schemata. But there are other distinctive features of the krisis in Circe’s hodos at the level of dependence. An essential part of what we have been building up in the second half of this chapter is an analysis of the discursive framework used to express the options forming this choice – the description of the two alternatives – and the process by which one or the other is to be selected. At the level of types of dependence, the description sections play a vital role in establishing the possible courses (of action) insofar as they provide the raw material for the premises in the ensuing argument sections that, in their turn, ultimately yield a conclusion in the form of an imperative to a certain kind of action. In Odyssey 12, Circe is judicious about introducing only those characters and places, and describing only those qualities, that have a direct bearing on the choice to be made and the argument to be supplied in support of her instructions. This in turn means that the description sections become much longer and more extensive than in the other entries in Circe’s hodos-catalogue (or in Homer generally) in order to present the information necessary for the argument. By contrast, the role of narration sections is much diminished: what matters is the state of affairs that constitutes the options of the choice. Again, this is something that is entirely different from both the Works and Days and the golden tablets.Footnote ⁷⁴

Finally, what are we to make of the three textual features discussed above? Functioning as limit cases of a sort, they present a rather more complex picture. Taken individually, it is hard to say that their appearance in Od. 12.55–126 seems terribly distinctive or marked. One finds the verb form esti often enough in archaic poetry (though, as noted, almost never with such frequency). Similarly, the practice of negating statements with a modal charge is not only to be found in such passages already discussed as the Invocation to the Muses in Iliad 2, but also, inter alia, in some of the reworkings it underwent at the hands of other archaic poets, as well as in plenty of other unrelated contexts.Footnote ⁷⁵ Epei and gar, meanwhile, are of course simply basic linguistic items whose use, particularly in the case of gar, are an extremely ordinary feature of the syntax of oral poetry.Footnote ⁷⁶

These questions take on special importance when we consider the Parmenidean side of the ledger. It would be a great folly, for example, to suggest that Od. 12.55–126 is somehow the primary driver motivating Parmenides’ thematization of the question what-is, or that his ground-breaking examination of modality is merely the result of his engagement with this passage, or that his interest in rigorously supporting his claims with arguments is just a minor outgrowth of Homer’s practice in Odyssey 12 or elsewhere. Any sensible attempt to address these questions would of course consider Parmenides in relation to a much, much broader array of predecessors, contemporaries, and even successors, and would place his own agenda squarely at the centre of the answers provided.Footnote ⁷⁷

Pinning down the exact nature of the relationship between Od. 12.55–126 and Parmenides’ ‘Route to Truth’ at this word-by-word level of granularity will always be difficult, and little in my argument hangs on the specific answers one might wish to supply (or even on answers being hazarded at all). Nevertheless, to the extent that they force us to ask other interesting questions, they are worthy of brief consideration here. At just what point do unmarked, not terribly distinctive features become distinctive? How much does it matter that in this passage of the Odyssey we encounter with unprecedented frequency the use of modally charged negations or the third person singular esti, both of which are, of course, distinctive hallmarks of Parmenides’ poem? Are there ways in which specific combinations of the features identified – for example, the use of esti to provide the evidence upon which is based, via a gar or an epei, an instruction that serves as the conclusion of a practical deliberation; or, similarly, the combination of a modally charged negation and an exclusive, exhaustive disjunction, to form a proscription, and thus a prescription, by negation – can, when taken as unit, form something more marked and less typical, more distinctive and less frequently trafficked? How ought we to weigh this against the importance of these features for Parmenides’ own philosophical agenda? And – to turn this question on its head – to what extent could we imagine that his agenda might have been shaped in part by the fact that it was this passage, with its distinctive or marked use of indistinctive and unmarked features of the Greek language, that Parmenides reworked?

This is not the place to attempt to answer these questions, since it is the commonalities at the level of the rhetorical schema and levels of dependence that are central to the points that I want to make. For the moment, one might simply observe that the similarities are there, whatever one is to make of them, and that what is desirable is perhaps a more subtly graded spectrum than a simple declaration that something ‘IS’ or ‘IS NOT’ intertextual;Footnote ⁷⁸ rather, we might ideally locate different degrees of intertextual proximity or distance.

6.2.1 Ontology, Epistemology, Discourse

6.2.2 Discursive Architecture and Temporality: Conclusions

Putting everything together, we may say the following. With regard to Havelock’s point, in Odyssey 12, the discursive organization dictated by the figure of the hodos offers a kind of syntax that allows for the expression of even quite abstract, ostensibly permanent relations, and not merely the depiction of actions. This is because, unlike a genealogically based conception of reality, the figure of the hodos offers a rhetorical schema that does not intrinsically require that the basic fabric of the world be constituted by time-bound, temporally pregnant entities; as a result, it allows for a kind of withdrawal of narrative dynamism – of agent and action – from a landscape whose fundamental features may be rendered inert, unchanging, fixed, and stable. It is this transition that opens the door to what we might call ontology proper, to a world of being, rather than, at best, genealogy’s world of things-having-once-become. In short, the rhetorical schema of the figure of the hodos offers a discursive framework that preserves the rigorous sequential ordering of items – that is, the formation of a series, not a list – but allows for the elimination of narrative frames while preserving the textual features of description. This is a discursive framework, that is, that allows for narrativity without narration and description without the unordered, list-like quality of descriptivity. It is this that is meant when, cribbing Mourelatos, one asserts that the rhetorical schema of the hodos offers a discursive architecture mediating the transition to a new way of asserting, arguing, persuading.

6.3.1 A Detour: The Bonds of Necessity and Logical Consequence

Or perhaps must get to the third, and then the fourth point in the itinerary. Why so? Odysseus’ journey is made by ship, across the trackless sea.Footnote ¹¹⁷ To cross this blank, unmarked space is to be perpetually threatened by the risk of planē – as nearly all the Achaean heroes returning from Troy can attest.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Where no path is visibly marked, aimless, directionless, backward-turning movement always remains possible.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But the kouros in Parmenides’ proem, as no one will have forgotten, travels by chariot. Furthermore, as is expressly specified in the proem, the chariot (ἅρμα, Fr. 1.5) travels on a ‘much-famed’ hodos (ὁδὸς πολύφημος, Fr. 1.2) and then, once through the portentous gates, ‘along a road-suitable-for-wheeled-traffic’ (κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν, Fr. 1.21). And this, as we saw above (Section 1.1), is highly significant.

To unpack this significance most effectively, let us advert once more to Mourelatos’s comments on the topic (discussed under the rubric of ‘the motif of chariotry’). Having examined what he calls the ‘motif of the-journey’ and the ‘theme of Fate-Constraint’,Footnote ¹²⁰ Mourelatos airs the following anxieties:

This impression is misguided, he reassures us: ‘motifs which appear as dissonant or unrelated to us are, to the archaic mentality, strongly linked by ties of analogy and association’.Footnote ¹²² The connection between overland travel by wheeled vehicle and sea travel by ship is indeed no challenge to establish.Footnote ¹²³ But Mourelatos struggles to connect the motif of chariotry and the motif of ‘the-journey’ to what he calls the theme of ‘Fate-Constraint’. He cites a few parallels between the language used to describe Odysseus as he is bound to the mast in the Sirens episode, to describe Poseidon’s hobbling his horses’ legs (Il. 13.37), and to make the case for the sēma akinēton at Parmenides’ Fragment 8.30–31. This does not ultimately carry him very far, however: ‘I am not suggesting that B8.30–31 envisages a convergence of the three ideas: hobbled horse, sailor strapped to the mast, sailor committed to his destination. My point is rather that the Homeric phrase has a certain suggestiveness and flexibility which allows modulation from one motif to another.’Footnote ¹²⁴

This, surely, is a weak point in the argument. Mourelatos attempts to bolster his case by examining the etymology and semantics of words derived from telos, which offers a slightly less precarious connection between ‘the-journey’ motif and theme of ‘Fate-Constraint’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Importantly, ‘the result of the deity’s “strapping” and “holding”’ – as expressed through the theme of the ‘Fate-Constraint’ – ‘is summed up, in the climactic section of B8, in the attribute tetelesmenon’.Footnote ¹²⁶ The word may be seen to operate not only on the ontological level (as a description of the nature of to eon)Footnote ¹²⁷ but also on the epistemological level: ‘In the order of knowing or thinking[,] the correct “route” is a “steadfast,” controlled route, “tied” or “committed” to its destination. This is the route that “consummates” the journey and “comes around” to the goal. On this journey the guide is the same Fate who bound what-is in straps.’Footnote ¹²⁸ Finally, Mourelatos cashes out this analysis in the claim (complementary to the notion that ‘the image of the route mediates a new concept of the nature of thinking and knowing’) that ‘the transformation of the theme of Fate-Constraint is a projection which reaches toward the concept of logical or metaphysical necessity’.Footnote ¹²⁹

As at several other important junctures, I both agree with Mourelatos on the larger questions (and draw inspiration from his pioneering analysis) and find the specifics of his interpretation unconvincing. By advancing this cluster of assertions – that ‘in the order of knowing or thinking, the correct “route” is a “steadfast,” controlled route “tied” or “committed” to its destination’; that the notion of being tied to a destination is expressed through the theme of the Fate-Constraint;Footnote ¹³⁰ and that this confluence of imagery (the motif of the-journey, the theme of Fate-Constraint) ‘reaches toward the concept of logical or metaphysical necessity’ – Mourelatos surely identifies a phenomenon of major importance for the development of deductive argumentation and the history of Western thought. But at just the moment Mourelatos isolates the key element establishing the connection between the motif of the-journey and the theme of ‘Fate-Constraint’ – namely, the motif of ‘chariotry’, which threatens to turn the mosaic of imagery into an ‘eclectic’ phantasmagoria – he also fails to capture the precise way this motif actually does forge the link between the other two dominant figures.

It is at this stage that reintroducing insights gleaned from the discussion of the physical nature of archaic Greek roads above (Section 1.1) can move the discussion much further forward. It is, in fact, precisely by shifting the journeying from travel by ship to travel by wheeled vehicle that this web of connections not only becomes possible, but indeed obvious and conceptually potent. Once the physical nature of archaic Greek roads is properly taken into account and the semantic density of the word hodos (encompassing both an activity and an object) acknowledged, the relationship between journeying, chariotry, and the implacable strictures of Fate not only ceases to be eclectic, but their deep unity at the level of both word and image, their mutual dependence and mutually reinforcing qualities, becomes irresistible. It is precisely because (and only because) the motif of the journey has been expressed through the motif of chariotry, precisely because (and only because) the motif of journeying has been transferred from sea to land, from ship to wheeled vehicle, that it not only can be tied to the motif of the Fate-Constraint, of binding, of a ‘steadfast’ route ‘tied’ or ‘committed’ to its destination, but it does so as naturally as if a latter-day Parmenides had made his goddess speak of a ‘rail journey of inquiry’.

Depending on one’s interpretation of Parmenides’ arguments, the point has implications of a potentially major scale for our understanding of the hodos dizēsios. First, imag(in)ing the hodos dizēsios described by Parmenides’ goddess as a rut road inscribed into the earth underscores the degree to which this road pre-exists the travelling to be undertaken upon it. The world traversed by such a hodos has stable, fixed features that exist independently of, and prior to, a journey passing through it.Footnote ¹³¹ Such a road must have been constructed already in advance of the travel (and with the express agency of, and according to plans determined by, the constructor).Footnote ¹³² Such a route is, that is, prescribed: the tracks, so far as the traveller is concerned, are always already there.

But such a route is also prescribed. This point bears directly on ‘the notion of logical or metaphysical necessity’ that Mourelatos saw emerging from the theme of ‘Fate-Constraint’, and may also help us reconsider yet further the nature of Parmenides’ argumentation as analysed by Owen. The discussion above considered the relationship between the sēmata of Fragment 8 as posited by Owen, which is to say, in reverse order. Attaining the fourth sēma presupposed attainment of the third; this in turn presupposed attainment of the first, as did attainment of the second sēma; and this itself presupposed passage by way of the first hodos of Fragment 2 and fragments 6 and 7. Imagining the hodos dizēsios as a rut road inscribed into the terrain of inquiry it traverses, however, we find grounds for a stronger, more suggestive understanding of the relationship between journeying, travel by wheeled vehicle, and the notion of binding and constraints, one with even more direct bearing on the notion of metaphysical or logical necessity articulated in Parmenides’ poem. If the hodos described in Fragment 8 is seen as a rut road running continuously the length of the fragment (and, indeed, from Fragment 2 to 8 via fragments 6 and 7), this suggests that not only is each new point in the argument premised upon points previously established but also that, once one has arrived at a particular point on this hodos, one has no choice but to follow this prescribed track. Once one has been forced onto the first route in Fragment 2,Footnote ¹³³ one has no choice but to arrive at the first sēma; and once one has arrived at the first sēma, if one continues the journey it is not only that one can reach the second sēma but that, locked into a predestined, preordained path, one must follow the track to the second point.Footnote ¹³⁴ And this is true at every step of the way: having attained the second sēma, if one carries on with the journey one must arrive at the third, and from the third, the fourth. Returning to Mourelatos’s point concerning the metaphysical or logical necessity expressed through the notion of a ‘steadfast’ path that ‘ties’ one who travels upon it to a particular destination, we may see how deeply appropriate, not to mention effective and powerful, is the image of travelling by wheeled vehicle along a rut road. For what route could possibly be more ‘steadfast’, more ‘tied’ or ‘bound’ to its destination – and the rest of the itinerary it encompasses – than a rut road one travels by wheeled vehicle?

So far we have discussed the strictly sequential ordering of discursive units into a series in terms of the phrase ‘con-sequence’. In the Odyssey, units are connected in this manner partly on the basis of their spatial contiguity and partly on the basis of the temporal order in which they are reached in the course of travel, understood as a series of actions in time. In Parmenides’ fragments 2, 6, 7, and 8, we have seen that, on Owen’s reading, the four arguments that make up the hodos-units of Fragment 8’s ‘journey’ are also connected partly on the basis of a kind of underlying logical ‘contiguity’ rooted in the logical geography of Fragment 8’s ‘story-world’; similarly, their being ordered into a sequence stems in part from the journey through them, the hodos (journey-in-totality) dizēsios one travels across this terrain. But, if we take the motif of chariotry seriously and attend to the language of the proem (and especially its reference to a hamaxitos, Fr. 1.21), what we find is a hodos(-journey) whose hodos(-itinerary) moves along a hodos(-object = rut road): along a pre-scribed track whose course allows for no deviation, no wandering, nothing but ordered movement along a predetermined path, whose inscription into the terrain demands that once one has attained a particular point one must travel to the next in the sequence, and do so unerringly and necessarily. On Owen’s reading, what we see in the convergence of the motifs of journeying, chariotry, and the Fate-Constraint – three images compressed and condensed into, and encompassed by, this hodos dizēsios, a hodos(-journey) whose hodos(-itinerary) is connected by a hodos (rut road) – would thus be the transition from narrative con-sequence to logical consequence.

6.3.2 Other Implications: keleuthos

Appreciating the physical nature of archaic Greek roads and the semantic breadth and density of the word hodos also provides a potentially illuminating insight into another phenomenon identified by Mourelatos. In his analysis of the ‘Fate-Constraint’, he identified three ‘faces’ or ‘hypostases’: Anagke (Constraint), Moira (Fate), and Dike (Justice).Footnote ¹³⁵ To these three, he adds a fourth: Peitho. In light of the semantics of the peith- word family in Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus and its role in parts of Parmenides’ poem, and alongside the words chrē and chreōn,Footnote ¹³⁶ Mourelatos sees peith- terms expressing not the externally imposed force of the other three terms but rather an ‘inner-directed justice’, an ‘attitude of adherence or submission’, a ‘compliance or obedience’ that represents ‘an agreeable submission to the authority of Constraint-Fate-Justice’.Footnote ¹³⁷

This interplay of internal and external forces, of obedience and agreeable adherence and compulsion and imposition, makes excellent sense at an ontological level. But yet again, Mourelatos has more difficulty substantiating his epistemologically oriented claims, such as: ‘[t]he four faces of the polymorph deity are aspects of the modality of necessity that controls what-is, and of the same modality as it applies to the route “___ is____”.’Footnote ¹³⁸ In his analysis of the relationship between these ‘faces’ or ‘hypostases’, he discusses the ‘modality of chrē, “it is rightly necessary”’, that pilots the ‘route to reality’Footnote ¹³⁹ and makes good use of his analysis of the peith- family while reminding us that the hodos of Fragment 8 was originally introduced with the phrase Πειθοῦς ἐστι κέλευθος (Fr. 2.4). Viewing this hodos(-itinerary) as moving along a hodos(-for-wheeled-vehicles) provides an elegant figuration of this interplay between internal adherence and external constraint at the epistemological level – in terms, that is, of the hodos dizēsios as ‘Route to Truth’. On the one hand, the grooves of the rut road provide an externally imposed force constraining the movement of the wheels of the chariot that journeys along it: it holds them fast in its bounds; on the other, the grooves of the rut road also provide free, agreeable movement to the chariot whose wheels ‘adhere to’ or ‘obey’ the prescribed track. The image of a journey by wheeled vehicle along a rut road expresses a forceful element of imposition, constraint, limitation, binding, while also articulating its own distinctive version of a journey of pistis and persuasion and ‘positive teleology’ (a felicitous phrase here).

Finally, analysis I have undertaken elsewhere and touch on in Chapter 1 can make a further contribution.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Recall that where the word hodos addressed a journey viewed as a single, unified whole (‘from the outside’) and in relation to its structure, the word keleuthos emphasized the process of journeying (viewed ‘from the inside’) and the series of actions and experiences that formed this process (Section 1.2). How fitting, then, that the process of travelling a hodos along a hodos, wheels locked into the track, should be referred to as a Πειθοῦς κέλευθος (Fr. 2.4): on Owen’s reading of the poem, to be swept along on this hodos is to undertake a κέλευθος, a journeying, that at every step of the way (or at every turn of the wheels) complies with, or adheres or submits to, the ‘positive teleology’ of the hodos-as-journey and the hodos-as-road.

6.3.3 Back on Track: Towards Conclusions

This, at any rate, is the view that a proponent of Owen’s reading of the poem’s argument would advance. But what would a proponent Sedley’s reading of Fragment 8 have to say? One should not forget that while Sedley sees Melissus’ arguments as forming ‘a single chain, with each predicate inferred directly from the previous one’, he reads each of Parmenides’ proofs as ‘largely independent’ and, with one exception, ‘self-contained, its premises either presented as self-evident or relying on one or both Laws’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

In fact, his reading also opens a surprising, even provocative, insight into the role played by the figure of the hodos in Parmenides’ poem. In the present discussion, two points should be borne in mind. First, Sedley still places great emphasis on the importance of argument (rather than mere assertion) to the development of Parmenides’ claims, of course.Footnote ¹⁴² Notably, in Sedley’s analysis of the specific argumentation advanced in Fragment 8, none of the four claims are proved independently of the ‘Two Laws’.Footnote ¹⁴³

This is to say that, second, the net effect of Sedley’s analysis is to shift the bulk of the argumentative labour being done to the fragments preceding Fragment 8; if the claims of Fragment 8 are not built sequentially one upon the next, they depend even more heavily on fragments 2, 6, and 7. Law Two – ‘No proposition is true if it implies that, for any x, “x is not” is, was, or will be true’ – is, we might think, a crystallization of the principle expressed in Fr. 2.7–8 (and reiterated in 6.1–2).Footnote ¹⁴⁴ For its part, Law One – ‘there are no half-truths. No proposition is both true and false. No question can be coherently answered “Yes and no”’ – is presented by Sedley as a paraphrase or gloss of 8.15–16, but he acknowledges that this is itself the product of the claims presented in Fr. 2.3–5 combined with those advanced in Fr. 6.4–9 (plus what has been understood as an implicit principle resembling the Law of Non-Contradiction).Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In other words, Law Two is the product of the blockage of the second way (viz. the one articulated in Fr. 2.5), while Law One is the result of passing first by way of the first hodos presented in Fragment 2 (2.3–4) and then, possibly, via the further krisis expressed in fragment 6 and 7. The four qualities attributed to to eon come in con-sequence to (and/or are therefore the consequence of) the decisions at the various kris(e)is in fragments 2 and 6 and 7: once one travels by this way, it is inevitable that one arrive at the four conclusions represented by the four sēmata (even if the order in which one arrives at them is no longer very important).

On this view, the Two Laws become a pair of tracks, of preinscribed ruts, into which one finds oneself locked once one has passed through the krisis or successive kriseis of fragments 2 and 6 and 7. What does not (with the exception of the third sēma and its relationship to the first) have any inherent value is the precise order in which these conclusions are presented. Thus, intriguingly enough, if one accepts Sedley’s reading, it is the rhetorical power invested in the figure of the hodos qua ‘rhetorical schema’ that becomes most striking. By using this schema, with its special capacity to systematize discourse and provide description without descriptivity, narrativity without narration, as a means of figuring this sequence of otherwise (potentially) unordered units of argumentation, it is as if Parmenides allows the sequence itself to take on the reified mass of a tomb midden (sēma) installed in the earth, or an altar in the agora, or a stone stele implanted empedon in the ground. Sedley’s Parmenides would thus prove a virtuoso rhetorician, a master of imagery and polyvalent language. By marshalling the resources compressed and contained in the word and image of the hodos, Parmenides would invest the sequence of the claims advanced in Fragment 8 – which, provided they come after fragments 2, 6, and 7, might otherwise be listed in (almost) any order – with the appearance of the same necessity and pre-existing ordering, the same power and authority of the geography of the natural landscape, attached to an itinerary through physical space.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

As noted above, my goal in discussing the competing interpretations of Fragment 8 offered by Owen and Sedley is not to advocate for the superiority of one or the other, but rather to explore two points. The first concerns the scope and applicability of the analysis above; what I hope to have shown is that the links I have constructed between Parmenides’ poem and its physical, linguistic, and poetic context are compatible with each of these two positions that define the mainstream spectrum of views on the proper ordering of the sēmata that form Fragment 8. The second builds on this by exploring more specifically what these links might mean, were one to endorse either Owen’s rigorously linear view of Fragment 8 or Sedley’s view that the sequence in which the sēmata are presented is not intrinsically related to the arguments supporting them.

6.3.4 Two Further Options

If the interpretations of Owen and Sedley define between them a range of widely accepted readings of Fragment 8, there are of course other interpretations that deviate from aspects of their shared orthodoxies. Although it would be excessive to conduct an exhaustive survey of how each of these other approaches might be reconciled with my account of Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation, briefly addressing two recent, exemplary interpretations of Parmenides’ Fragment 8 is still a valuable exercise; doing so will help illuminate more precisely the nature and scope of this book’s contributions to the study of Parmenides’ poem and our understanding of the history of archaic – and Western – thought more broadly.

The first is the distinctive line of interpretation of Parmenides’ poem pioneered by Scott Austin.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ One of Austin’s most valuable contributions is to delineate a pattern of assertions, negations, positions, and privations whose recombinations underlie – and perhaps even serve as a generating principle behind – Parmenides’ arguments.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ An attractive consequence of approaching Parmenides’ arguments via this aspect of their formal construction is the original perspective it opens onto their content. More specifically, Austin’s interest in the triadic pattern of position, negation, and recapitulatory double negation and his observations regarding the creation of dyadic pairings and triadic groupings in Fragment 8Footnote ¹⁴⁹ reveal a subtly different way of grouping together the content addressed by the fragment’s four sēmata. On Austin’s view, the arguments in lines 8.6–15 address what-is in terms of time, lines 8.22–31 address being in terms of space or ‘the occupation of place by mass’,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ and then in lines 8.32 and 8.42–49 ‘the conclusions developed during the considerations of time and of mass/place are recapitulated, combined, and rolled up into a complete statement’.Footnote ¹⁵¹

What most catches the eye in the current setting is the extent to which, seen through the lens of Austin’s interpretation, Parmenides’ arguments advance in a fundamentally sequential, progressive manner. On Austin’s reading, Parmenides’ argumentation is defined by a necessary and inherent directionality; as a consequence, it is hard to imagine a scenario consistent with Austin’s view in which Parmenides could just as easily have swapped the sēmata around or advanced them in a different order had he so desired.Footnote ¹⁵² As Austin points out, the successive interplay of dyads, triads, and singlets, assertions and negations, positions and privations elaborates ‘the story of a gradual movement away from contrariety and towards unity … The logic and rhetoric of the “Truth-Section” are cumulative’.Footnote ¹⁵³

There are many significant points of non-overlap between Austin’s interests and orientation and those of the account of Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation provided here. Austin is little concerned with Parmenides’ poetic background, his pervasive use of road imagery, the dramatic setting in which the staging of the enumeration of the routes is embedded, and other ‘poetic’ aspects of Parmenides’ poem; likewise, his extensive discussion of such things as negative predication, modal operators, and Platonic, Trinitarian, or Hegelian dialectics might seem to have little in common with the present book’s concerns. This only makes it all the more striking, however, that Austin’s analysis seems not only highly compatible, but indeed to align in neat congruence, with the analysis I have undertaken above. That the discursive architecture undergirding the hodos narrated by Circe to Odysseus should provide the larger organizing framework within which Parmenides could explore, in a manner both systematic and argumentatively rigorous, the complete array of possible combinations of assertion and negation, position and privation is not only plausible, but highly attractive. To put the matter the other way round: if what Austin’s account reveals is a pattern of arguments formed from different combinations of privation and negation, position and assertion, the question remains as to how these different phases or stages in the argument are to be joined together: how to imag(in)e the relationship between them? But this is precisely what the rhetorical schema of the hodos and its associated types of dependence provides: a discursive framework to be filled in according to the pattern described by Austin. On this view, the two formal perspectives of Parmenides’ construction of his argument – Austin’s and the one offered here – would not only complement each other but, by triangulating key principles underlying their construction, could also provide an important and potentially guiding insight into what Parmenides’ arguments mean.

Perhaps rather more difficult to reconcile with the historical account I have offered is the line of interpretation recently developed by Richard McKirahan.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ McKirahan’s presentation has its share of important virtues. Re-emphasizing that Parmenides ‘lived before canons of deductive inference had been formalized’, he sagely observes that ‘the interpreter’s job is not to aim for formal validity, but to attempt a reconstruction of Parmenides’ train of thought, showing how he might have supposed that the conclusion follows from the premises he gives’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ While just what it means for a conclusion to ‘follow’ a premise (i.e. how we ought best attempt to ‘reconstruct’ Parmenides’ ‘train of thought’ – or, better, hodos dizēsios) gets to the very heart of what is at stake here, on these points, at least, I find myself in fervent agreement with McKirahan – even as our different approaches, and answers, to this question get to the heart of our disagreement.

At this juncture, however, we part ways. Or nearly at this juncture, for, as with other interpreters, McKirahan also takes the lines following 8.2 to constitute a programme (he opts to include 8.5–6)Footnote ¹⁵⁶ of points, or clusters of points, that Parmenides will set out to prove. McKirahan’s list differs from Owen’s, Sedley’s, and those of other interpreters in several respects, however. First, McKirahan distinguishes six groups, rather than the usual four sēmata (he styles these ‘Groups A-F’). Second, McKirahan’s groups do not strictly track the sequence in which the sēmata are presented from line 8.3; the items that form the programme are clustered instead according to another organizing principle.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Thus, third, McKirahan’s groups cut across the ordinary division of the programme, in some cases resulting in the pairing of qualities that are usually taken as distinct, while in others splitting up familiar pairings. So Group B, for example, is formed by ‘whole’ (οὖλον, 8.4), ‘complete’ (τέλειον, 8.4), ‘all together’ (ὁμοῦ πᾶν, 8.5; συνεχές, 8.6), thereby collecting under one heading attributes deemed by Owen, Sedley, and most other interpreters to correspond to the second and fourth sēmata in the programme (oulon and teleion/teleston, respectively).Footnote ¹⁵⁸ On the other hand, mounogenes (8.4), ordinarily read with the grain of the syntax of line 4 as being paired with oulon (and thus one half of the signpost for ou diaireton, viz. sēma 2, lines 8.22–25), is here glossed as ‘unique’ and paired with ‘one’ (ἕν, 8.6), which together form their own distinct cluster, Group F.

Since McKirahan’s approach is geared towards his understanding of the content of the arguments he finds rather than the sequence of their presentation, this ultimately yields a sequence of Categories that does not track the movement of Fragment 8.6–49 any more than it does lines 8.3–6, another major difference between McKirahan’s reading and most others. So, for example, the treatment of members in Category D: ‘changeless, motionless’ are to be found scattered throughout various parts of the poem, including lines 8.26, 38, 41, ‘and possibly 8.29–30’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Finally, another result of McKirahan’s approach is that certain qualities identified in the programme – Group F: ‘unique’ (μουνογενές) and ‘one’ (ἕν) – remain entirely unaddressed in the remainder of Fragment 8,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ while other portions of the body of Fragment 8, namely lines 42–49, lack any identifiable correlate in the programme.Footnote ¹⁶¹

It is worth emphasizing one final time that this is not the place to assess the merits of specific interpretations of Parmenides’ arguments. Rather, the more pertinent question here would be how a defender of McKirahan’s view, which expressly – and rightly – underscores the need to remain alert to the risks of anachronism and to understand Parmenides’ poem and its arguments in their historical context, would reconcile his or her approach and the results it yields with the historical question of how Parmenides developed his radically new way of speaking and arguing. If the resources offered by the semantics of the word hodos, the real objects to which it referred, and the intertextual dramatic and discursive frameworks it conjures up do indeed play a crucial role in mediating the transition from Homeric narrative to Parmenidean argumentation, what does this mean for interpretations of Fragment 8 that do not see these arguments as formed from a series of distinct segments or phases of the itinerary of the hodos dizēsios, or the programme announcing a catalogue of these phases point by point as they will be asserted and argued for? Conversely, were we to accept an interpretation which did not respect this linear, sequential, cumulative structure,Footnote ¹⁶² would this imply that an account of Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation different from the one offered here might be required?