This introduction has three goals: to locate this book’s arguments in contemporary scholarship on Parmenides, to outline its methodology and structure, and to establish the stakes of the project as a whole. The first considers Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration – the central topic of this book – as a relic of the ‘Greek Miracle’ paradigm; it also addresses discussions of Parmenides’ use of poetry and his relationship to Homer. The second addresses distinctions between actors’ and observers’ categories and between reasoning and discourse, and explores the Foucauldian discourse analysis that anchors the book’s treatment of the relationship between Parmenides and Homer. The third requires setting out what this book does not intend to do in order to specify its main contribution: providing an account of how Parmenides’ use of the image of the hodos helps him invent extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration. The Introduction sketches out the three axes of the book’s argument: an exploration of the physical reality of archaic and classical Greek roads, a discussion of the semantics of the word hodos, and an articulation of the relationship between Parmenides’ and Homer’s poems.

The previous chapter locates Parmenides in his physical and linguistic contexts; this chapter locates him in his poetic, intellectual, and cultural milieux. It argues that we need to understand Parmenides’ poem in light of the late archaic revolution in the way that Homer was conceptualized. This chapter examines the epistemological framework Parmenides inherits from Hesiod and Xenophanes in considering the nature of human enquiry; the way that other poets in the late archaic period make use of the newly emergent figure of Homer and the corpus of Homeric poetry, especially with respect to their claims to knowledge and their relationship to the Muses; and the ways that scholars have characterized developments between Homeric poetry and the poetry of the late archaic period. I show how Parmenides uses the resources this Homeric tradition offers to launch a multipronged response to the challenges set down by Hesiod and Xenophanes. These include: reinitiating contact with a Muse-like figure in the proem; the use of crossroads imagery to articulate fundamental distinctions; ceding the voice of the poem to the unnamed goddess; the use of argument; and the return to the privileged poetic form of epic dactylic hexameter.

This chapter outlines the key methodological framework to be used to analyse Homer and Parmenides and detail the specifics of their relationship. I first set out the terms that Foucault develops in his Archaeology of Knowledge, and then detail the ways that these terms do and do not make contact with established topics of classical and Homeric scholarship, including text-types and discourse modes, A-B-C patterns, the oimē and theme, and catalogues and catalogic discourse. I use the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 10 as a sample text to analyse according to this methodology; the result is a clearly defined textual architecture that the image of the hodos governs more generally.

This chapter pivots to Parmenides’ poem by examining at a more general level the close intertextual connections with Odyssey 12. I then examine in close detail how the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in Parmenides’ Fragment 2 bears a close resemblance to the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12; I also detail important differences between Parmenides’ and Homer’s uses of this disjunction. Finally, I explore the importance of this disjunction for Parmenides’ groundbreaking extended deductive argument and, especially, its role in the practice of demonstration.

This appendix addresses Parmenides’ Fragment 5, which has sometimes been taken as a challenge to the linear, hodos-like structure of Parmenides’ argument. I establish the matrix of possible readings this fragment allows and show how this framework can organize different interpretations of it offered by previous scholars. Finally, I make clear that none of these readings of Fragment 5 undermines the argument made in the course of this book.

This chapter is in many ways the culmination of the book. It applies the analysis of chapters 3 and 4 to the structure of Parmenides’ Fragment 8, and shows how Parmenides uses the blueprint of Circe’s hodos in Odyssey 12 to craft what we would call an extended deductive argument; in this, it develops the discussion of Chapter 5. It cashes out the implications of Chapter 1 by showing how Parmenides takes advantage of rut road imagery to articulate what we would call a notion of logical necessity, and by showing how the durative and telic components of the word hodos define the teleological shape of his arguments. Building on Chapter 2, I set out the traditions Parmenides developed by creating a discursive structure that is both systematic and argumentatively rigorous. I also examine how the poem’s complex relationships between story, plot, and the time of narration plays a crucial role in bestowing on Parmenides’ arguments, and on demonstration more generally, an ostensibly timeless quality. Finally, I assess my conclusions about Parmenides’ invention of deductive argumentation in relation to other scholars’ discussions of his arguments, and clarify what my argument does not claim to offer – and what it insists on.

This chapter applies the analysis of the preceding chapter to the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12, which I argue serves as a discursive template or blueprint for Parmenides in his ‘Route to Truth’. In addition to building on the notions of the rhetorical schema and types of dependence developed in Chapter 3, I extend my analysis of the discursive architecture governed by the hodos to include the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction which is a central feature of Od. 12.55–126. I also show how the hodos in Odyssey 12 has distinctive features – including the use of modally charged negation and unusually lengthy description sections followed by argumentatively rich units of text – which link it to Parmenides’ poem but differentiate it in crucial ways from other texts and phenomena, including general patterns of Homeric deliberation, polar expressions, the crossroads in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the so-called Orphic gold tablets.