DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-671423
title: The archaeology of Parmenides: philosophy, poetry and ritual in fifth-century Campania

description: In this dissertation, I develop an interdisciplinary interpretation of the philosophical poem of Parmenides by grounding it in the material culture of its time and place.  Parmenides lived and composed his poem in Greek hexameters during the fifth-century bce in the small polis of Elea on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy in the region now known as Campania.  In traditional histories of Greek (and, subsequently, Western) thought, Parmenides holds pride of place as the father of abstract rational philosophy.  He is credited with inaugurating the tradition that theorizes an unbridgeable divide between sensory perception and its physical objects in the material world and the disembodied thought of the mind and its metaphysical objects located within the sphere of the disembodied mind.  Evidence from archaeological inquiry, however, reveals several sites of convergence between the Parmenidean poem and ritual performance that call into question Parmenides’ place in this tradition and open up new ways of understanding the philosophical poem. ❧ In the Chapter One, “Parmenides in Elea,” I examine trends in scholarship on Parmenides and fifth-century Campania, noting that very few scholars have considered what archaeological finds might tell us about the poem, or how the poem might help us to understand local material culture.  In order to place the Parmenidean poem in local context in a meaningful way, I extricate it from its conventional place in the hellenocentric history of Greek thought and present a study of the deep history of the material world in which the poem was composed and received.  Elea was part of a cultural environment constructed through the interaction of immigrants with local cultures, such as the Etruscans, various Greek-speaking peoples (from the mainland, Ionia, and other parts of southern Italy), and the Phoenicians.  I deconstruct the model that makes Parmenides part of a homogeneous ‘Greek’ intellectual history and Elea indicative of a unilaterally ‘Greek’ cultural context, thereby opening up the poem to be read as part of a multi-faceted, local, material environment.  In Chapter Two, “The Journey,” I focus on the prologue, which depicts the journey of a kouros into the gated province of the goddess who subsequently speaks the remainder of the Parmenidean poem.  I look to resonances between the materiality of the language of the proem and the material remains of local sanctuary sites to propose a relationship between the poem and the practice of procession in cult ritual.  Comparison with Orphic gold tablets helps illuminate this relationship. ❧ In Chapter Three, “The Goddess,” I explicate the significance of the several goddesses who appear in the Parmenidean poem, one of whom remains anonymous while revealing the central philosophical theses of the work.  Traditional interpretations of the poem have read this goddess allegorically, as a personification of truth or as a literary allusion to Hesiod.  In my research, I have discovered a surprising concentration of sanctuary sites and votives dedicated to goddesses in fifth-century Campania that show intriguing convergences with specific characteristics exhibited by the female divinities in the Parmenidean poem.  This chapter analyzes these interconnections.  Cross-reference with the Derveni Papyrus provides the basis for Chapter Four, “Philosophy, Poetry and Ritual,” in which I develop an interpretation of the Parmenidean poem as a form of ritual poetics.  Each of the convergences between the text and material culture discussed previously will be shown to contribute to a reading of the poem as a ritualization or part of an assemblage of artifacts associated with cult ritual in significant ways.  This reading encourages a rethinking of the meaning of several of the poem’s key terms, including alētheia, doxa, and noein.  Finally, in “The Material Condition of Parmenides,” I conclude with an analysis of the intellectual trends that have segregated mind from matter and thought from practice, in order to demonstrate the place of this project in the intellectual history of philosophy and archaeology.  By re-incorporating the local, material, and female into the philosophy of the late archaic and early classical western Mediterranean world, my reading engenders a new interpretation of the poem and, I hope, takes some steps toward the development of a methodology applicable to other texts and contexts.