Parmenide: le vie della ricerca

In the wall paintings of the Thumb of the Diver emerges an extreme degree of stylization that proves the cultural maturity of the Greek region between Elea and the Sele in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. This paper aims to underline the play that Parmenides develops with the literary tradition to set up the theoretical basis for the school of Elea. Often critics discuss the distinction among fields of knowledge or not knowledge that Parmenides introduces in the poem, an evident sign of self-consciousness. Mostly the distinction follows the paradigm of polarity that characterizes the archaic thought. Here we can see the origin of the image of the door and of the ways of day and night in the tale of the journey and it is possible to discover the paradigm of polarity in the first section of the speech that the goddess offers, that is in the vibrant exhortation to listen to both the truth and the opinion which does not persuade, but engage mortals mind. The panorama becomes more and more complex in the fragments: Parmenides weaves the desire to describe the result of the research as redemption from the darkness of the ignorance which determines the condition of common people with the desire to explain the distinction among the ways of the research, not all positive, not all oriented towards the truth. How many ways does Parmenides indicate? Does the shadow of Heraclitus appear in the fragments? Which relationship does the image disclose with the Orphic perspective, that critics often evoke for the school of Elea? Perhaps it is useful to analyse the literary tradition, that inserts the image of the ways with metaphorical meaning already in Homer. This paper tries to connect the image of the ways with the peculiar pattern of the Priamel. In the poem the decisive choice shines in the frame of parallel structures, that allow to consider very different points of view.