Pelliccia, Hayden_The Text of Parmenides B1.3 (D-K)_1988_AJPh, 109, 4, Pp. 507-512

7/29/2019 Pelliccia, Hayden_The Text of Parmenides B1.3 (D-K)_1988_AJPh, 109, 4, Pp. 507-512

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/pelliccia-haydenthe-text-of-parmenides-b13-d-k1988ajph-109-4-pp 1/7

The Text of Parmenides B1.3 (D-K)

Author(s): Hayden PellicciaSource: The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 109, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 507-512Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/295076 .

Accessed: 16/09/2013 21:48

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The

American Journal of Philology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 16 Sep 2013 21:48:36 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/295076?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp





http://www.jstor.org/stable/295076?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup



THE TEXT OF PARMENIDES B1.3 (D-K)

In all texts of the fragments of Parmenides printed in the last

fifty years he begins his poem by speaking of "the way which" (or,

according to some, "the goddess who") "carries through all towns the

man who knows ..." In fact oarl,, which is alleged to be the readingof the best manuscript of Sextus' books AdversusDogmaticos,has no

manuscript authority at all. aorlq irst appeared in the text of the third

edition of Die Fragmenteder Vorsokratikerpublished in 1912, where it is

attributed to the Ms. N (= Laur.85.19), so called by Mutschmann....

The "countless attempts at emendation" of [the readings of L and E

et al., ndvT-rlrland nd6vaTr respectively] did not include oqrl.Variantsfrom N were first published in 1911 by A. Kochalsky in his disserta-

tion. . . , but his professedly complete list of new readings from N for

these books of Sextus includes no reference to Parmenides 1.3. It

follows that aoxrlcan hardly have appeared among the variants which

he says he had already communicated to Diels. The word aorrl appears,however, as the reading of N in vol. ii of Mutschmann's text of Sextus,which was published in 1914. It would seem, therefore, that Diels gotthe reading privately from Mutschmann, who collated N in 1909 and

1911 .... In any case, the word is a simple misreading of the manuscript,

which has nd6v'cTrl.

A. H. Coxon, CQ 62 (1968) 69.

With the removal1 of all manuscript authority from aor1q,editors

may resort to defense of the transmitted text or to conjecturalrestoration based upon "palaeographical likelihood." I believe theyshould do neither.

First, there is less to the reading &o-tr than met even Coxon's

sceptical eye. Coxon has established, by necessary inference, thatMutschmann and Diels were in private communication before 1912,when the third edition of Vors. appeared. At some point during this

period Mutschmann claimed to discover in N a reading (dorl) now

known not to be there. Given these facts, it is certainly of some

interest that Diels had already restored, before Mutschmann's first

1The results of Coxon's re-examinationof N have been corroboratedby L.

Taran, Gnomon 9 (1977) 656, n. 15, who has himselfinspected

the Ms.

American Journal of Philology 109 (1988) 507-512 ? 1988 by The Johns Hopkins University Press







HAYDEN PELLICCIA

collation of N (in 1909), the very words 68t ndvx' -crurln anothertext2

as early as 1902, and that this text, thus restored by Diels, was later

used by Kranz,3 in 1916, as a confirmatory parallel for the new

reading acrlq n Parmenides 1.3. The text in question, the one Diels

restored in 1902, was that inscribed upon one of the so-called "goldenleaves" recovered from an Italian grave mound in 1897. Diels saw

in this text "ein orphischer Demeterhymnus," and his reconstruction

of 11 lines of it found its way into the OrphicorumFragmentaof Otto

Kern4 (who praised Diels' ingenuity lavishly), and into every edition

of Vors. since the third, including the most recent, where it appearsas "Orpheus 1 B 21." The first three lines of Diels' reconstruction

are as follows:

rIpo-oy6vcp Trf plapi ?prl KupeArltaK6ppca

... Arillrtpo ... nv6nra Zeu

"HAit?rip 6t& nr6vx' dior vioeat, 01; NiKaCt

Line 3 of this text has been repeatedly cited to support the readingKarLa a6v' doTar n Parmenides 1.3; the app. crit. of D-K9 ad loc. says"Die Lesart [sc. aoTrl] der

vorzuglichenHs. N, die nur sehr selten

interpoliert, vgl. mit ("HAteHnfp)b6ta 6dv' &o-lqviocat) 1 B 21." (The

app. crit. to 1 B 21 refers back to this passage of Parmenides.) Besides

Kranz (in both Vors. and the article mentioned above), Bowra5 and

Taran6 have pointed to the "Orphic hymn" to defend the reading

arqr in frag. 1.3.

The trouble with this "parallel" is that the whole "orphischer

Demeterhymnus," as presented in Diels' original article, reproducedin Kern and D-K, and quoted by Kranz, Bowra, and Taran, is almost

entirelyDiels'

invention,a

pieceof not

unobjectionableverse com-

position, "Triballian rather than Greek," as Zuntz, the most recent

2 "Ein orphischer Demeterhymnus," in FestschriftTheodorGomperzVienna 1902)

1-15.3 "Aufbau und Bedeutung des parmenideischen Gedichtes," SBB (1916) 159 =

W. Kranz, Studien zur antikenLiteraturund ihremFortwirken(Heidelberg 1967) 129.

4 0. Kern, OrphicorumFragmenta(Berlin 1922) 117-8.5 C. M. Bowra, "The Proem of Parmenides," CP 32 (1937).6 L. Taran, Parmenides,A Text with Translation,Commentary, nd Critical Essays

(Princeton 1965) 12.Remark

here, however,Guthrie's caution

(Hist.Gk. Phil. II

[Cambridge 1965] 7): "The text of the Thurii tablet, sometimes quoted in this

connexion, is too uncertain for it to be added to the evidence."

508







THE TEXT OF PARMENIDES 1.3 D-K)

editor, puts it.7 This is ajudgment rendered on the text as improved

by Diels' ministrations; but one can fully appreciate the distance

between Diels' raw material and his final product only by comparingthe transcriptions8 of what actually appears on the "golden leaf' withwhat is printed in his article (and in Kern and D-K). The unedited,unreconstructed text of the tablet is not unfairly characterized asutter gibberish; few Greek words can be made out, and "more often

than not Greek words actually extant and, each by itself, unobjec-tionable do not, in their combination, yield any coherent meaning."9In short, "a text more corrupt than this will not easily be found."'1As for Diels' reconstruction: "it would be idle to enlarge upon the

obvious intrinsic faultiness of this reconstructed text .... The fact isthat no coherent reconstruction is possible on a basis as corrupt as

this."11

The transmitted text of Diels' line 3, quoted above, is as follows,

according to Zuntz' transcription:12

HAIEIYPAHHANTAZTHINTA-THNIXATOHENIKAI-

Gilbert Murray (who regarded Diels' whole attempt to discover here

a hymn as "a highly improbable hypothesis") construed out of thetranscription used by him (and in all essentials the same as that of

Zuntz) the following:13

"HAi? nupaurl pavTaoXli (pavcaoTql EKaTO ... t. (?) NiKa ibo

Zuntz, who reports numerous criticisms of Diels' text, though noneso vigorous and persuasive as his own,14 reads:

7G. Zuntz,Persephone

(Oxford1971)

350.("Triballian"

is Lobel'scoinage.)Zuntz' judgment of the text is endorsed by M. L. West, The OrphicPoems (Oxford

1983) 266: "largely unintelligible (Kern's text is almost all the product of Diels's

imagination)."8 Available in Diels, op. cit., Kern, op. cit., Murray, loc. cit., n. 13 infra, and

Zuntz, loc. cit.9

Zuntz, op. cit., 350.10

Zuntz, op. cit., 345.1 Zuntz, op. cit., 350.

12Zuntz, op. cit., 346.

13apudJ. Harrison, Prolegomena o GreekReligion (Cambridge 1903) 666.

14

E.g., Zuntz, op. cit., 344, n. 1 (where see especially the quotation fromWilamowitz ["Warum denn orphisch? .. ."] 349 with n. 8, 350 with n. 4, and the whole

chapter (344-54) passim.

509







HAYDENPELLICCIA

HAtEnup qr ncavr' ao-rq [or: navxaqcqv] E) VIKal (

His commentary says: "after AH one vertical hatch (like ), thereaftera vertical crack which is likely to have absorbed the right half of

n."15 He does not find any sense in the text.

I trust that these reports make it clear that the "orphischer

Demeterhymnus" offers no evidence at all for the reading o-trl n

Parmenides 1.3. Diels' reading 6id nrdv'dcurl n line 3 of the "goldenleaf' text is a very tentative restoration by conjectural emendation,without any contextual support; it has no authority for "Orpheus,"nor does it furnish any support for aolq in the text of Parmenides.

II

Nonetheless, it can still be maintained that, in spite of Coxon's

revelation about Ms. N, orrlqemains the best available reading in

Parmenides 1.3, on the grounds that it provides an acceptable sense

whiledeparting only slightly

from the truemanuscript readings.16On the first point here I again defer to Coxon: "&o-rl ... is

incompatible with 1.27, according to which the way is dn' 6dv0pncovKTOCS dlTou."17his argument seems to me irrefutable, so I turn now

to the argument from "palaeographical likelihood," which has been

used to support both aohr1'8 and the transmitted text ("Atrl).19 I

15Zuntz, op. cit., 346.

16A. P. D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides(New Haven 1970) 22 n. 31,

severelycriticized

byTaran

(op.cit., n. 1

supra,656), who himself maintains the

principle of "palaeographical likelihood" here impugned by me. Cf. n. 18, infra on

the reading recently adopted by Coxon.17 CQ 62 (1968) 69; the argument was first advanced by W. Jaeger; see his

Theologyof theEarly GreekPhilosophers Oxford 1947) 98, with notes.18 Mourelatos, loc. cit. D. Gallop, in his recent text of the fragments, Parmenides

of Elea (Phoenix Supplement18 Toronto 1984), adopts Jaeger's conjecture 6otvfl(Jaeger,

op. cit., 225, n. 23); this reading originated as an "emendation of the corrupt word

acqrl"(Jaeger, ibid.), i.e., such authority as it possesses derives from its orthographicalresemblance to the letters transmitted in the Mss. Coxon's own edition (A. H. Coxon,

The Fragmentsof Parmenides[PhronesisSuppl. Vol. III Assen 1986]) came out after this

article was completed. In 1.3 he adopts Heyne's readingndv-'

a(v)TrI(v).19H. A. S. Tarrant, "Parmenides B1.3: Text, Context, and Interpretation,"Antichthon 10 (1976) 1-7; the article begins: "It is an almost universal principle that

510







THE TEXT OF PARMENIDES B1.3 (D-K)

believe it rests upon sand. Reconsider frag. 1.3b-4a: all the manu-

scripts are in agreement as to the letters between nav and (ppet; they

are Tacrl, variously divided and arranged. I present, for the sake ofdiscussion, this version:

KqKcarc nov rTOT] ppepEtEi6oa (pCZTa'

TJ Pcp6opqv . . .

Twice we see the same20 sequence of letters: xcarq ep- and then -TO

fq pep-; one instance fits into its context and makes perfect sense;the other does not, and the text makes no sense at all; the conclusion

is inescapable: -ra -Efbefore (pp6Opqvin line 4 displaced whatever itwas that came before yppei in line 3.21 Therefore the transmitted

letters Tacxq n line 3 are wholly corrupt. The text should be printedas follows:

ri Kar nav ( ) (pepe ?eila6 (p&cra

Restoration can only be made by conjecture, without anyspecious appeal to "palaeographical likelihood." Anything so mun-

dane as rdv-' &aorlmust, however, be shunned. I offer, exempligratia,the following:

tKaTa nIav (lo6 ov) (ppel ei66Tca (pXCor

The participial phrase22 occurs in this position twice elsewhere in

texts should not receive emendation until the reading of the Mss. has received carefulconsideration." This is taken to be a defense of textual conservativism, here in

supportof the reading KcaTnravr' trl ("A'Tq,tq,"Arq). ("The alternatives which I have bracketedmake no great difference to the significance of the line.")

20 The history of the treatment of the iota subscript makes its presence orabsence a non-factor. In the text of Parmenides virtually all modern editors print'AAXrqinrn B2.4 (where the Mss. have 'AArleirlq)and 8apfq n B7.1 (where the Mss. have

6aplf). See Taran, op. cit., n. 6 supra,on B7. 1, who refers to H. Usener, KleineSchriftenII (Leipzig 1913) 116ff.

21 On this kind of scribal error see J. Jackson, Maginalia Scaenica(Oxford 1955)223-227.

22 In nav -o6 6v, n&v, which would in later Greek ordinarily mean in this position

'each, every' (soin

Peripateticaccounts of Eleatic

thought we actually find the phrasenav To6v in the sense 'each thing that exists', i.e., each particular [Parmenides A46;Zeno A24]), must mean here 'in its entirety, all, the whole', as Hdt. 9.11.3 n&v o6 6v

511







HAYDENPELLICCIA

the surviving fragments of the poem (B 4.2; 8.1923), and nav IT6 6v

is precisely the territory over which (Kala) both the way of truth and

the goddess travel.By way of conclusion, some general remarks on o6 o6vwill be

in order. Parmenides' use throughout the poem of the singular (I6

h6v) is an innovation the purpose of which is not far to seek. In

earlier writers there is found only the plural (r i6ovra),used, usuallyin association with Id t' too6opeva npo6 ' o6vxa, o describe reality in

terms of its constituent elements.24 This tendency to use the pluralto designate reality is evident in Heraclitus (whom some have thoughtto be a special target of Parmenides' argument25), both in the famous

ndvta pci and especially B7 D-K cEnrdvT TdovTa Kanv6OyEvorro, 5iveqav 5tayvoi?v:as clear an assertion of the enduring multiplicity of real

entities as can be found anywhere. Parmenides, in denying multi-

plicity, would have been required, for the sake of logical consistency,to shun the established use of the plural ncdvla d 6ovra nd to adoptthe singular n&vT6 o6v.26

HAYDENPELLICCIA

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

(where the verb has its "veridical" sense [v. C. H. Kahn, "The Greek Verb 'To be' and

the Concept of Being," Foundationsof Language 2 (1966) 249ff.]) means not 'each thingthat was or happened' but rather 'the whole truth' (as per LSJ, s.v. eipi AIII; cf. naoav

iqtv 6A491av at Th. 6.87).23 Not according to the text given by D-K; but according to the text now most

generally accepted, which also happens to be the transmitted text; see Taran, op. cit.,

n. 6 supra, ad loc., and cf. C. H. Kahn's review Gnomon40 (1968) 123f).24 In most of these passages (for example, in all the instances of the formula

listed by West on Hes. Th. 32) the plural participles designate the objects of knowledge;this point should be of interest to those who maintain that the subject of trri throughoutParmenides is "the objects of discourse or inquiry" (e.g., J. Barnes, The Presocratic

Philosophers[London 1982] 163; G. E. L. Owen, "Eleatic Questions," CQ n.s. 10 [1960]

84-102 = D. J. Furley and R. E. Allen, Studies in PresocraticPhilosophyII [London

1975] 48-81). If my restoration of n&vT6t6v is accepted at B1.3, it can be resuppliedas object of et6Tra: the road which bears the man who knows [all that exists] over all

that exists'.25 See Guthrie, Hist. Gk.Phil. I, 408, n. 2, and II, 23f.26 I wish to thank Professors A. T. Cole, R. L. Fowler, D. R. Shackleton Bailey,

and R. J. Tarrant for their criticisms and suggestions.

512

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 16 Sep 2013 21:48:36 PMAll bj JSTOR T d C di i




Pelliccia, Hayden_The Text of Parmenides B1.3 (D-K)_1988_AJPh, 109, 4, Pp. 507-512

Documents

Transcript of Pelliccia, Hayden_The Text of Parmenides B1.3 (D-K)_1988_AJPh, 109, 4, Pp. 507-512