Homer, Parmenides, and the Road to Demonstration by Benjamin Folit-Weinberg

Reviewed by: Homer, Parmenides, and the Road to Demonstration by Benjamin Folit-Weinberg David Sider Homer, Parmenides, and the Road to Demonstration. By Benjamin Folit-Weinberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. Pp. xvi, 367. Not long after Tom MacKenzie's book on the poetics of the three Presocratics who wrote in verse,1 we now have a thorough literary study on the road imagery of both Homer and Parmenides. The pages devoted to the former are designed not only to be of interest in themselves (and they are), but also, and primarily, to show how much the later [End Page 154] poet has structured his argument and its road imagery on the model of his predecessor. Two passages in particular from the Odyssey were, Folit-Weinberg argues, employed as precise models by Parmenides as he shaped his own poem, which itself pervasively and deeply employs roads in various ways. Folit-Weinberg of course is not the first to concentrate on Parmenides' road imagery; if nothing else, consider the titles of two important books: A. P. D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides: A Study of Word, Image, and Argument in the Fragments (New Haven 1970; Las Vegas 2008)2 and N.-L. Cordero, Les deux chemins de Parménide (Paris 1984). While Cordero is concerned primarily with the philosophical question of whether Parmenides speaks of two or three epistemological roads and Mourelatos (inter alia) treats both the literary and the philosophical uses of this metaphor, Folit-Weinberg is quite frank about concentrating on its literary use and only then on how it may shape the form of Parmenides' philosophical exposition—an approach I applaud. Since words for road do indeed appear a surprisingly large number of times in both their literal and their metaphorical senses of both method and (path of) song,3 a new analysis should be welcomed. Folit-Weinberg has read widely in this literature, frequently laying out particular issues with great clarity, but his primary aim is not to solve such problems as Parmenides' peculiar use of \st'/eånai or the reason why he bothers to explain the mundane objects of d—ja, after, it seems, having condemned them to falsehood.4 Nor is Folit-Weinberg much concerned with textual matters. He is content to use the text established by Diels and Kranz,5 never bothering to consider whether an alternate reading or conjecture might affect his argument. His focus is rather on certain intertextual readings between Parmenides and the Odyssey, building on Havelock's literary analysis6 with a layering of theoretical schemes laid out by Foucault (missing from the book's index) and Vernant. The first question Folit-Weinberg puts to himself determines his own route of investigation: "Where did Parmenides' extended deductive argument and move toward demonstration come from?" (10–11). One might think that it is quite possible that someone whose idea of true existence is so strikingly his own would also be able to establish his own modus explicandi; Folit-Weinberg, however, presents an elaborate Foucauldian discourse analysis of Circe's instructions to Odysseus in Book 12, which, he then argues, applies equally to Parmenides' exposition of the goddess's route for him (148–157). Foucault might say that this is because his theory is universally applicable, but Folit-Weinberg argues rather that this is because Parmenides is consciously structuring his "road"—or rather the two roads which the goddess lays out—on Circe's travel directions to Odysseus. Accepting for the sake of argument that Foucault is worth the effort,7 one has to report [End Page 155] that Folit-Weinberg's analysis is seriously flawed by a misunderstanding of Circe's words at 12.55–58, which he prints and translates as follows: But then indeed after your companions have passed by the Sirens, what follows there I shall no longer narrate piece by piece which of two possibilities will in fact be your hodos, but consider this carefully yourself. I shall tell you both from this point. I quote from 147, but this passage is so crucial for Folit-Weinberg's argument that he repeats it in...

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