Books Written by Parmenides

One. He wrote a single poem in hexameters, later called On Nature, of which about 160 lines survive. This page lists that poem and 9 key editions, translations and studies of it.

His poem dates from the 5th century BC. The key editions and studies, in order, are Hermann Diels’s Parmenides Lehrgedicht (1897) and Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903), Leonardo Tarán’s Parmenides (1965), Alexander Mourelatos’s The Route of Parmenides (1970), David Gallop’s Parmenides of Elea: Fragments (1984), A. H. Coxon’s The Fragments of Parmenides (1986), Peter Kingsley’s In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999) and Reality (2003), and André Laks and Glenn W. Most’s Loeb Early Greek Philosophy (2016).

With the poem itself: David Gallop’s Parmenides of Elea: Fragments (1984) gives the Greek and an English translation of every fragment in 144 pages. Then read A. H. Coxon’s The Fragments of Parmenides (revised edition 2009) for a full commentary, or Peter Kingsley’s In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999) for a mystical reading.

He wrote only one, the poem later called On Nature. Its best-known part is the Way of Truth, and especially fragment 8, the long argument that what is is ungenerated, imperishable, whole and unchanging, and fragment 3, translated by John Burnet as “it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.”

A goddess tells the narrator that there are two ways of inquiry: that “it is” and that “it is not”. The second cannot be followed, because what is not cannot be thought or said. From this she argues that what is cannot come into being or perish, cannot move or change, and is whole and complete, like a well-rounded sphere. She then describes the world as mortals see it, made of light and night, while warning that this account is deceptive.

Not in any modern or Eastern sense: the word did not exist, and he worked within Greek philosophy. But his central claim, that reality is one, whole and unchanging and that the many changing things of the senses are not what truly is, is close to the idea of a single undivided reality that non-dual traditions describe. Plato and Aristotle read him as a monist, someone who held that reality is one. Peter Kingsley’s books make the link most directly, reading the poem as a guide to an experience of that reality.

About 160 lines, of an original that may have been around 800. Sextus Empiricus preserves the proem, and Simplicius, a sixth-century AD scholar, copied out fragment 8 in full, which contains nearly all of the central argument. The Way of Opinion survives only in small fragments and prose summaries.

Plato’s Parmenides shows the old Parmenides, about 65, visiting Athens with Zeno and questioning a very young Socrates, then leading a long examination of the One. Some scholars doubt the meeting ever happened, but the dialogue is the basis for dating Parmenides’s birth to around 515 BC.

Kingsley argues that the poem is a sacred text meant to lead the reader through an experience of death and rebirth, not an exercise in logic. Academic reviewers have been divided: a review of Reality in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2004) called it “a work of rare genius”, but also said it “will strike many if not most readers as monstrous” and “asks too much of its readers”. Most academic studies, such as those by Tarán, Mourelatos and Coxon, read the poem as philosophy in the ordinary sense.

Zeno of Elea, his younger friend, defended his views with famous paradoxes, and Melissus of Samos argued for a stricter version of the claim that reality is one. Together they are known as the Eleatic school, after Parmenides’s home town.