Editorial:
On the Poet-Philosophers of Greece,
a Few Notes
“Fine,” someone interrupted me, “I understand all that about the Greeks; but how this poetic religious people could also become a philosophical people, that’s what I cannot see.”
“Without poetry,” I said, “they would never have become a philosophical people.”
“What has philosophy,” he retorted, “what has the cold sublimity of this science got to do with poetry?”
“Poetry,” I said, certain of my ground, “is the beginning and end of this science. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, it comes out of the poetry of an endless godlike Being. And so ultimately what is irreconcilable in philosophy joins together in confluence in the mysterious wellspring of poetry.”
* *
This is from Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin. The great animation in his words owes something to the time when they were written: the 1790s. That was the decade when “to be young was very Heaven,” according to Wordsworth. When he completed Hyperion Hölderlin was not quite 30.
While the tone of his words relates to the time, the content has a good deal to do with place. He was German and, as it happens, he was a friend of Hegel’s. (It is hard to imagine Kant or Wittgenstein having a friend who would rhapsodise like that.) Hölderlin’s enthusiasm is born of supreme confidence. His insight tells him that the strange cold science which was born all those years ago in Greece cannot destroy the source that it sprang from. Rather, it must itself keep returning to its origin, even when it appears most cold and alien.
But let’s take the first part of his argument, which is a controversy all by itself. “Greek philosophy is the child of Greek poetry” – is that true? The currently prevailing opinion would see things differently. In a nutshell, prevailing opinion thinks that the ancient Greeks were striving to discover the road that leads to modern science and technology and technicised modern life. Philosophy was a means to this end, while poetry was more a nuisance. And so philosophy can be seen as an abandonment of poetry, or a liberation from poetry (or at least making poetry stay away from the areas science is fencing off, as Aristotle does). The philosophers gave up poetry and myth and took up science and reason.
Throughout the 20th century this understanding was promoted by the leading English, French and American writers on the topic. Their successors continue the good work. See, for example, the latest volume to be titled Early Greek Philosophy, published by the Catholic University of America in 2012, with a keynote essay by Charles Kahn. “My theme is a familiar one,” Kahn says (and he can say that again!), “… from mythos to logos, from mythopoetry to a rational account of nature.”
But Hölderlin’s thoughts did have echoes in his own land.
“Philosophy as the un-tuned resonance of great poetry. Re-tuning it to concepts – which is to say, re-tuning Being.” Martin Heidegger jotted these words in his notebook round about 1932. They are puzzling, hard words, harder than Hölderlin’s. Yet maybe they are what Heidegger’s hundred published volumes are saying, put in a nutshell.
Our argument here, sketched in very brief outlines (with references given at the end), is that much of the early Greek philosophy should not be called untuned. It was tuned still. Which is to say, many of the great Greek philosophers were poets. So many that there is really no arguing with Hölderlin’s description.
Hesiod
For those who try writing the history of Greek philosophy, one of the first problems is this: what shall we do with the poet Hesiod? Do we call him a philosopher or not?
Hesiod lived in the 7th or 8th century B.C. He was somewhat older – or alternatively, according to M. L. West, somewhat younger – than the Homer who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey as we have them now. In his Theogony he gives an account of the birth of the gods, beginning with the great cosmic beings such as Earth and Sky, Night and Day etc. As Hesiod tells it, all of the Greek gods were immortal but not eternal. They would never die, but once they had not existed. Hesiod provoked philosophy: that much can be proved. But did he practise it? Aristotle said decisively that he did not. Hesiod and all his likes were “theologians” and “mythologists”, and a waste of philosophers’ time. “It is not worth our while to enquire seriously into the subtleties of the mythologists.”
Diogenes Laertios, the oldest and most readable of all the historians of philosophy, accepts Aristotle’s classifications to begin with. But later he contradicts himself and refers to Hesiod as a philosopher. This is typical of what happens to Hesiod in the histories of philosophy. He gets firmly pushed out the door, but he tends to come back through the window.
Those high-nosed Cambridge Aristotelians Kirk and Raven (and they didn’t improve when they became three-headed as Kirk, Raven and Schofield) issue the following pronouncement: “By no stretch of the imagination could the views of (Hesiod, etc.) be described as philosophical.” And yet they have had to give quite a lot of attention to Hesiod in order to set their scene. On the other hand, there’s a book whose title translates as The Origin of Greek Philosophy from Hesiod to Parmenides, by Olaf Gigon, one of the livelier treatments of this topic. Also, Hermann Frankel’s study of the Theogony led him to conclude that Hesiod was doing basic philosophical thinking and that Aristotle’s judgment was simply wrong.
Thales
Reason began in Miletus, according to the story told by Charles Kahn and so many others. Miletus is now a mound rising above a plain where there are many olive trees, but once it was the principal town on the Greek-settled strip of Asian coast called Ionia (currently in Turkey). Three men from Miletus, Thales, his pupil Anaximander and pupil’s pupil Anaximenes, were active thinkers from about 600 B.C.
Aristotle made the history of philosophy begin from Thales, and Kirk-Raven follow suit. “It was in Ionia that the first completely rationalistic attempts to describe the nature of the world took place.” They offer some suggestions on why this great event chose that location: “There, material prosperity and special opportunities for contact with other cultures – with Sardis, for example, by land, and with the Pontus and Egypt by sea – were allied, for a time, with a strong cultural and literary tradition dating from the age of Homer.”
And surely we should also mention the very good weather, which allowed people to sit out late in the evenings drinking wine at long tables under the trees by the sea, telling “endlessly varied stories,” as visualised by Ryszard Kapuczinski?
However, there’s a problem about making philosophy start with Thales, as Heidegger pointed out. The problem is, we’re not sure what he actually said. We only have reports, or reports of reports, or reports of reports of reports… In the major collection of pre-Socratic fragments compiled by Hermann Diels there is not a single phrase attributed to Thales as his own.
Aristotle, drawing on others’ reports, said that Thales made water the fundamental principle of everything. But was this water like Cambridge water? “Thales thought that all things are full of gods,” Aristotle further reported. Aetius expanded on this: “Thales said that the mind of the world is god, and that the sum of things is besouled, and full of daimons; right through the elemental moisture there penetrates a divine power.” So the implications of what Thales said for, say, Hesiod’s Theogony, are not clear.
Olaf Gigon says of the three Miletians: “All three of them wrote in prose; one can say that with certainty.” He gives nothing to substantiate his statement. Why is he so certain? Well, because he’s writing the romance of the march of reason… However, in the ancient encyclopaedia called the Suda it is said that Thales wrote epic verse, and Plutarch also lists him as one of the poet-philosophers.
Anaximander
Unlike Thales, it seems that some few of Anaximander’s own words have survived. In all, just one or two sentences. They are most remarkable words, whatever they might mean.
According to tradition, Anaximander did not agree with Thales that water was the principle of all things. He thought that the fundamental principle was the infinite (or the limitless, the unbounded). Infinity was divine, indestructible and immortal. It was about mortal destructible things that Anaximander made his surviving statements. In Kurt Pritzel’s translation (in the Catholic University of America book), they sound as follows:
“Things perish into those things out of which they have their being, as is due; for they make just recompense to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance (or assessment) of time.”
And this is an alternative formulation by Jonathan Barnes: “The things from which existing things come into being are also the things into which they are destroyed, in accordance with what must be. For they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice, in accordance with the ordering of time.”
These translations are similar to Kirk-Raven’s version and to the German version by Diels. However, Heidegger maintains that all such versions are mistranslations. In his opinion, words like “justice”, “reparation”, “injustice”, smuggle in the ethical thinking of later times, which has nothing to do with Anaximander: for him the Greek words had no such ethical charge. Heidegger’s translation of the second part of the statement cannot easily be re-rendered into English, but basically it goes something like this:
“Things keep order with one another and there is a corresponding re-ordering of their disorder, under the ordinance of time.”
Heidegger wrote a book about these two sentences of Anaximander’s. For now let us note what an ancient commentator said: they are “somewhat poetical words.” Quite so!
Xenophanes
And once when he passed a puppy which was being whipped,
they say he took pity on it and made this remark: “Stop, do not beat it; for it is the soul of a dear friend –
I recognised it when I heard its voice.”
That was said about Pythagoras, in mocking reference to a belief that presumably he held: the transmigration of souls. The verse may even have been written while its target was still alive. But Pythagoras, who was born on an island off Ionia but migrated to Italy, is even more unknowable than Thales. Leaving him aside (and also Anaximenes, who is not as significant as the other two Miletians), we can turn to the author of the quatrain above, Xenophanes, the first philosopher for whom we have some significant quantity of his own words.
Xenophanes came from Colophon in Ionia. He was expelled from his native community and afterwards lived in Sicily. He may also have settled in Elea, the most famous town in Italy associated with Greek philosophy. (One must grant Kirk-Raven this much: in the early philosophers’ life stories there are a good many references to travel and resettlement.)
Xenophanes seems to have been the first philosopher who confronted Homer and Hesiod, and who suggested that human beings more or less necessarily have inaccurate notions of the gods. Our priority here is to draw attention to the way he expressed himself. He was a professional poet and rhapsode (reciter). It appears that he spent some time with one of the great patrons of outstanding artists, a man in the class of Maecenas and Lorenzo de Medici: Hieron of Syracuse. His poems show a range of themes and metres. He did epic, elegaic and iambic metres; he did trimeters, tetrameters, pentameters, hexameters. Every word that we have from him is in verse.
Parmenides
Diogenes distinguished two separate branches of Greek philosophy, the Ionian and the Italian. He counted Pythagoras and Xenophanes as Italians. Parmenides, however, was the first major philosopher who was Italian-born, though he was probably the son of Ionian migrants. His birthplace was Elea, about seven miles south of modern Naples, a town founded by Ionian Greeks fleeing from the Persians in 545 B.C.
“He was the pupil of Xenophanes, but he did not follow him,” Diogenes tells us. But Parmenides too composed his philosophy in verse. He is known as the author of one long poem from which fragments survive, totalling a hundred and sixty lines. By now there are surely a hundred and sixty books about those hundred and sixty lines – actually, Manfred Kraus, writing the Parmenides section in the latest German history of philosophy, gives a bibliography of 873 items.
The poem describes a journey in a chariot drawn by a team of wise horses guided by the daughters of the Sun, who lead Parmenides to a meeting with a goddess. The goddess delivers the first, possibly the greatest, philosophy lecture on record. It’s extremely demanding and challenging. In many and various ways it has made a profound impression. For example, at least one German reading it in the early 18th century found it shockingly similar to the recent philosophy of Spinoza, and he branded Parmenides a Spinozist and an atheist. In the 20th century people as far removed from each other as Martin Heidegger and Karl Popper both considered Parmenides one of the greatest thinkers of all times. So also did Plato, over two millennia previously. In Plato’s dialogues Parmenides is the only philosopher who is allowed to take up a challenge from Socrates and come through the test in triumph.
Here one does not wish to compete with the 873 commentaries, and it will suffice to quote the first three lines of the poem. There have been countless arguments over these three lines, going on since the 19th century: what the words actually are, what the words convey, how they should be translated. H. C. Günther, whom I mainly follow here, is the writer who seems to make most sense. Though pedants have pointed out that the present tenses used in some of the verbs could strictly speaking have a past meaning, in fact it appears that in this explosive opening the present tenses are emphasised. So the journey goes on! The poet Parmenides seems to be saying: Philosophy is underway. And it’s never going to stop:
The horses that bear me as far as my courage reaches
were leading me, when the goddesses had set me on that road
of many reports, which carries the knowing man through all cities…
Heraclitus
Heraclitus was yet another Ionian, from Ephesus. Diogenes says he was an exceptionally arrogant man, who scorned all those who had read many books and thought they were wise: Hesiod, for example, and Pythagoras, and Xenophanes too. He does not seem to mention Parmenides.
For the last 200 years or so Heraclitus has been popular as the philosopher of constant change, and the man who said all things develop from struggle. When this journal was recently attacked by one of the committees for the construction of the Fourth International, Heraclitus was the first philosopher who was favourably mentioned.
One should note, however, that in his own time Heraclitus thought that nobody understood him: “Men always prove uncomprehending of this account which is valid, both before they have heard it and after they have heard it.” To which Heidegger added that no one had understood him in modern times either: he had been misrepresented and distorted. But we cannot go into that here.
Diogenes reports that the poet Scythinos undertook to put Heraclitus’ teachings into verse. But should we think of Heraclitus’ own statements as prose?:
“Eternity is a child at play, playing draughts: the kingdom is a child’s.
*
The sun will not overstep its measures, otherwise the Furies, ministers of Justice, will find it out.
*
A man in the dusk looks for a light, his sight being quenched: living, he looks on the dead while sleeping; awake, he looks on the sleeping.
*
We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not.”
These sayings are not like anything written in Irish, but they make one think of the Bérla Féne, the charged language that is used in the ancient Irish laws, or the un-metrical passages in the ancient stories. People call those prose, because that’s supposed to be the word for language where you can’t find a metre. But they aren’t prose, they are poetry. When reading the ancient Gaels or when reading Heraclitus, one should agree with Mallarmé: “To tell the truth, prose doesn’t exist.”
Horand Pfeiffer, having shown that Parmenides is not the incompetent poet that people like Diels thought him, goes on to say that his poem is “positioned on the border between poetry and prose.” But this is an unnecessary concession. Parmenides has done too many good hexameters to leave him in this frontier zone! However, I suppose one could not object if someone said this about the language of Heraclitus, that it is somewhere near the border of poetry and prose. I think of him as a poet nevertheless.
Here is the wisdom of Cambridge: “The surviving fragments have very much the appearance of oral fragments put into a concise and striking, and therefore easily memorable, form; they do not resemble extracts from a continuous written work.” (Kirk-Raven.)
And here is what H. C. Günther says:
“The initial Greek thinking is poetic, and so it is no coincidence that in thinkers like Parmenides and Empedocles it presents itself entirely in poetic garb. But the thinking of Heraclitus, of Anaximander, is poetic also. In this sense it is pictorial, but pictorial not in the sense of the pictured but of the picturing. The initial thinking is poetic inasmuch as it does not think out of the extensively established language-forms of a cultivated field of concepts, but rather it builds the experience of its thinking immediately into language. The initial Greek thinking is a unique mode of poetry, just as it is a unique mode of thinking, and so, thinking through this essential quality of the initial thinking, the relationship between poetry and thinking needs to be thought over anew.”
Empedocles
With Empedocles, who came from Acragas in Sicily, we have another major Italian philosopher. He was the grandson of a man who had won the horse-race at the Olympic Games in 496 B.C. He believed he was inspired by the gods and the Muses of poetry, and he sounds quite as sure of himself as Heraclitus. At the opening of one of his poems he seems to refer to himself as a god, but one cannot be certain of the context. Once again we must emphasise one thing about this philosopher: he was a poet. What survives of his work amounts to several hundred lines. All of it is in poetry.
Empedocles is the great western poet of the theme of transmigration of souls. He agreed with Parmenides’ goddess that there was no such thing as birth or death. But there were processes of change:
Another thing I will tell you: there is no birth for any
mortal thing, nor any cursed end in death;
only mixing and interchange of what is mixed,
those things are – but men name them birth.
Things were constantly torn apart and reunited by the two great forces of Love and Strife. Strife broke up things; Love brought them back together again.
In Anger they have different forms and are all apart,
but in Love they come together and are desired by one another.
Plato
The only other important Greek philosophers before the time of Socrates were Zeno and Anaxagoras, whom perhaps we can concede to have been writers of prose. (Democritus the atomist, who is usually lumped in with the pre-Socratics, was Socrates’ contemporary.)
One should mention too that some of the dramatic poets helped to put philosophical ideas in circulation. Euripides, who had studied under Anaxagoras, was a philosopher of some kind. In his philosophical aspect maybe we can think of him as an ancient version of Karl Jaspers, who thought that philosophy should be for everyone and that his own existentialism was just what the world needed to keep it well-adjusted and out of trouble.
(As portrayed by Nietzsche, “Euripides taught the people… to observe, to act, and to think logically, artfully and with the cleverest sophistries… The bourgeois mediocrity on which Euripides staked all his political hopes now had the chance to speak.” This is Euripides more or less as he appears in The Frogs by Aristophanes.)
Worth mentioning also is the comic dramatist Epicharmus, who would probably have met Xenophanes at Hieron’s court in Syracuse. A few chunks of his dialogues have survived. In one of them a speaker launches a philosophical attack on Hesiod’s notion of the birth of the gods, quite as sharp as anything that Xenophanes wrote:
The gods were always there, they were never missing;
the things of this world have always had the same being.
– But they say that Chaos was born, as the first of the gods.
– How so? He could never have come into being out of nothing.
– So nothing came about first? – No, nor second, I tell you;
the things that we’re talking of now have always existed!
The great lyric poet Pindar, yet another of the artists to be found at Hieron’s court, was not philosophically-minded. But he did elaborate the metaphorical idea of the path (life’s path, poet’s path, path to truth) which was so important to a thinker like Parmenides.
The last great poet-philosopher was Plato. Diogenes tells us that he began his literary career as a tragedian. Given his enormous talent, he would surely have become number four in the line of the greats: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato. But when he was going to take part in the tragic drama competition he happened to hear Socrates speaking outside the theatre, and he burned his verses forthwith.
As a philosopher Plato was harder on the poets than anyone else. He even professed to want them expelled from the city unless they conformed to official doctrines! That was relatively early on, when he wrote The Republic. Evidently he was struggling to overcome his own poetic spirit. But in his later years he did not continue to repress the poet in himself – on the contrary. When Lewis Campbell studied Plato’s language, he found that the later works showed “a preference for words belonging to the tragic period of Greek poetry” and were full of tragic rhythms and cadences. And this was progressive: in the latest works these cadences “are no longer occasional but perpetual, and the speaker does not “veil his face” with Socratic irony while uttering them.”
Elsewhere, e.g. in the Phaedrus, Plato acknowledges that the poets perform a function of public education, when they glorify the works of the past. But it all depended on their inspiration. In Phaedrus and Ion he exponds his theory (which many an impressionable artist has taken seriously) that no poet can be any good until he completely loses his mind. A poet must be simply a mindless medium, unobstructed by thoughts of his own, transmitting what the Muses or gods want to say. (But of course, that might not be what the city needed to hear.)
“There is an ancient feud between philosophy and poetry,” Plato declares in The Republic. “There are thousands of traces of the ancient quarrel…” But if there was such a feud, should we not think of it as a civil war within poetry?
Postscript: Aristotle
Aristotle was the kind of philosopher whom no one could well mistake for a poet. (Granted, Diogenes quotes a truly awful praise-poem which he is supposed to have written on the death of the tyrant Hermias.) Aristotle did not believe in any feud between philosophy and poetry. Or if there had been such a feud, then philosophy had won. But he knew there could be no total victory, since poetry would certainly survive; it grew naturally, after all. (Almost two millennia later Francis Bacon would still be saying that it grew like weeds.)
Aristotle was happily fitting everything into his knowledge-boxes, and there were boxes for poetry too. There is no indication anywhere in his Poetics that he felt in any way menaced by poetry, that he thought it could possibly threaten his values or what he was trying to do. The tone is relaxed and friendly. In passing, in his breezy way, he even defends those poets who might say dubious things about the gods. Here he refers to Xenophanes: what the poets say about the gods may be totally wrong, as far off the mark as Xenophanes alleges. But what if they are just repeating “what people say”?
The point is, what one expects from poetry is not strictly truth. The poet must describe not what has been, but what may be. If there’s a choice between “probable impossibilities” and “improbable possibilities”, he should choose the former. “It was Homer who taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully,” Aristotle says, and this is a compliment, not a condemnation. Quite as Defoe said afterwards about prose fiction, poetry is “lying like truth”. It involves a kind of imitation of Nature, which gives people pleasure even when the things imitated are sad or cruel; and here poetry is part entertainment, part medicine (purgation of the emotions). There is also a kind of learning involved, but it is learning on a low philosophical level. Aristotle, however, is prepared to give poetry a relatively high status as a literary art. It ranks above history, being more philosophical, as it tends more to the universal than the particular.
But what about all those poets, from Hesiod on, who had set out to tell the truth about everything? Aristotle brushes them aside in a couple of sentences right at the beginning. Just because you put medicine or philosophy into metre doesn’t make you a poet, he says. The only thing Empedocles had in common with Homer was the metre, and “physicist,” not “poet,” is his proper description. Much later a whole theory rejecting didactic poetry was deduced from those couple of sentences, but Aristotle doesn’t have the least inclination to spell things out. He is anxious to get on to what really interests him: epic and dramatic poetry. The tremendous poem of Parmenides, so important for his own science, is simply ignored – though of course he will say something about it when he’s sorting the Metaphysics box. (For that matter, the praise-poetry composed by Pindar and Bacchylides doesn’t seem to interest him either.)
Aristotle’s Poetics had little influence even in Roman times and virtually none thereafter, down to the 17th century. It was only in the 18th century that Lessing emphasised and elaborated the rejection of didactic verse. As late as the 1890s, not everyone had got the message. And that is why (as he pointed out) the great pedant Hermann Diels, in the year 1897, found himself having to explain why Parmenides was out of bounds.
REFERENCES
“‘Fine,’ someone interrupted…”: Hyperion München 1993, 119.
“My theme is…”: Charles Kahn in McCoy, J. (ed.), Early Greek Philosophy: The Presocratics and the Emergence of Reason ed. 2012, 1.
“Philosophy as the untuned…”: Heidegger, M., Notebooks II No. 56 (GA 94, 22).
“It is not worth our while…”: Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 3.
Diogenes accepts Aristotle’s classifications: Diogenes Laertios, Lives of the Philosophers, Bk. 1, 14.
Hesiod as a philosopher: ibid. Bk. 9, 22.
“By no stretch…”: Kirk, G. S. and Raven, J. E., The Presocratic Philosophers 1966, 72.
The Origin…Gigon: Gigon, O., Der Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie von Hesiod bis Parmenides, Basel 1945.
Frankel, Hesiod a philosopher: Frankel, H., Early Greek Philosophy and Poetry 1973, 148.
“It was in Ionia…”: Kirk and Raven 73.
“Endlessly varied stories”: Kapuczinski, R., Travels with Herodotus 2007, 270.
Heidegger, problem with Thales: GA 35 (on Anaximander), 2.
Diels, presocratic fragments: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.
Aristotle, “Thales thought…”: Kirk and Raven 95.
Aetius, “Thales said…”: ibid. 95-6.
“All three of them…”: Gigon 41.
Suda on Thales: Kirk and Raven 85.
Plutarch, Thales a poet: Coxon, A. E., The Fragments of Parmenides Las Vegas 2009, 166.
“Things perish into…”: McCoy (ed.) 19.
“The things from which…”: Barnes, J., Early Greek Philosophy 2001, 21.
“Things keep order…”: Heidegger, M., GA 35, 21.
Heidegger on Anaximander’s sentences: GA 35.
“Somewhat poetical words”: Simplicius, cited Barnes 21.
“And once when he passed…”: Barnes 29.
Range of themes and metres: Heitsch, E., Xenophanes: Die Fragmente 1983, 8.
Kraus, bibliography: Kraus, M., Parmenides. In: Holzhey, H. (ed.) Die Philosophie der Antike Bd. 1 / 2 Frühgriechische Philosophie 2013.
Parmenides a Spinozist: Item 152 in Kraus bibliography.
- C. Günther on Parmenides: Günther, H. C., Aletheia und Doxa 1998, Chapter 1.
Heidegger Review No. 1 attacked: Socialist Fight No. 19, 19 (Gerry Downing).
“Men always prove…”: Based on Barnes 49.
Diogenes, Scythinos versified Heraclitus: Diogenes Bk. 9, 16.
“Eternity is a child…”: The four sayings from Barnes 50, 60, 63, 70.
Mallarmé, “To tell the truth…”: Calasso, R., Literature and the Gods 2001, 129.
“Positioned on the border…”: Pfeiffer, H., Die Stellung des parmenideischen Lehrgedichts in der epischen Tradition 1975, 191.
“The surviving fragments…”: Kirk and Raven 185.
“The initial Greek thinking…”: Günther, H. C., Grundfragen des griechischen Denkens 2001, 235-6.
“Another thing …”: Barnes 129.
“In Anger…”: Barnes 124.
Nietzsche, “Euripides taught…”: Nietzsche, F., The Birth of Tragedy 1993, 55-6.
Epicharmus, “The gods…”: Cited Diogenes Bk. 3, 10. A version in Barnes pp. 4-5.
Pindar on the path: Becker, O., Das Bild des Weges und verwandte Vorstellungen in frühgriechischen Denken 1937, Chapter 2.
Plato burned his verses: Diogenes Bk. 3, 5.
“a preference for words…”: Campbell, L., The Sophistes and Politicus of Plato 1867, xxxi.
“are no longer occasional…”: ibid. xl.
Diels, Parmenides: Parmenides Lehrgedicht, Berlin 1897, 7ff.
The Heidegger Review 