Fragments

What survives of Parmenides

Parmenides wrote one book and it is lost. These 7 lines reached us only because other writers copied them into works of their own, usually while arguing about something else.

  1. The mares that carry me as far as desire may reach were escorting me, once they had brought me onto the goddess's road, which carries a man who knows through every city.

    DK 28 B1, Wording likely his

    Saved by

    Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians VII.111 (c. 200 CE)

    The same sceptic who preserved Heraclitus's opening also copied out the proem of Parmenides, again as material for an argument about how anyone could claim to know anything.

    The opening of the poem: a chariot ride to a goddess who will explain what is. Thirty continuous lines, which for a presocratic is an enormous survival.

  2. Come now, and I will tell you the only ways of enquiry there are to think of: the one, that it is and that it cannot not be; the other, that it is not and that it must not be.

    DK 28 B2, Wording likely his

    Saved by

    Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Timaeus I.345 (c. 440 CE)

    A Neoplatonist reading Plato reached back nine centuries for the lines that first set out the choice between being and not-being.

  3. For the same thing is there for thinking and for being.

    DK 28 B3, Wording disputed

    Saved by

    Clement of Alexandria, and again by Plotinus, Miscellanies; Enneads VI.23; V.1.8 (c. 200 and c. 260 CE)

    Quoted independently by a Christian apologist and by the founder of Neoplatonism, who read it as an anticipation of his own doctrine that thought and being coincide.

    Eight words in Greek and still argued over: whether it says thinking and being are the same, or only that what can be thought is what can be.

  4. It must be that what is there for speaking and thinking of is; for it is there to be, but nothing is not.

    DK 28 B6, Wording likely his

    Saved by

    Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 86.27 (c. 540 CE)

    Simplicius was explaining a passage of Aristotle and quoted the original to show that Aristotle had reported it fairly.

  5. One way only is left to speak of: that it is. On this way there are signs exceedingly many: that being ungenerated it is also imperishable, whole and of a single kind and unshaken and complete.

    DK 28 B8, Wording likely his

    Saved by

    Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 145.1 (c. 540 CE)

    Simplicius wrote that he was transcribing these verses at length because copies of Parmenides's book had become scarce. He was right to worry; his commentary is now the reason we have them.

    The longest surviving stretch of the poem, roughly fifty lines. A scholar's private anxiety about a rare book is why the argument survived at all.

  6. As each man has a mixture in his much-wandering limbs, so mind is present to men; for it is the same thing that thinks in men, the nature of the limbs, in each and every man.

    DK 28 B16, Wording likely his

    Saved by

    Aristotle, and separately Theophrastus, Metaphysics; On the Senses 1009b21; 3 (c. 340 and c. 320 BCE)

    Aristotle quoted it while arguing that earlier thinkers had confused thought with bodily states, and his pupil Theophrastus quoted it again in a survey of theories of perception.

    Preserved by two men who disagreed with it, in the course of explaining what they took to be its mistake.

  7. In this way, according to opinion, these things came to be and now are, and hereafter having grown from this they will come to an end. And upon them men have laid down a name to mark each one.

    DK 28 B19, Wording likely his

    Saved by

    Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's On the Heavens 558.9 (c. 540 CE)

    Quoted as the closing lines of the section on mortal opinion, to mark where the poem ended.

    Believed to be the last surviving lines of the poem.

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