Parmenides and the “First God”: Doxographical Strategies in Philodemus’ <i>On Piety</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the several Herculanean testimonia to Parmenides, fr. 13 of PHerc. 1428 no doubt represents the most important piece of evidence for this pre-Socratic philosopher. A new autopsy of the papyrus made a reconstruction of the name ‘Eros’ at line 12 possible. Within the Doxa section of Parmenides’ poem, Eros is notoriously described as the first of the gods to be created by Aphrodite (DK 28 B 13). In fr. 12 DK, Aphrodite is defined in turn as the goddess governing the universe, who represents the balancing point of the astronomical theory of celestial spheres. In the second part of the Herculanean fragment, Philodemus says that, according to Parmenides, the “first god” would be inanimate and that gods who were generated by him would have, in the view of mortal people, the same passions of human beings. The paper argues that Philodemus could have (a) either intentionally mixed his sources in order to create a pendant between PHerc. 1428’s frs. 12 (on Xenophanes) and 13 (on Parmenides); (b) gone back to an older tradition, later developed by early Stoicism, which exactly describes the “first god” as the ruler of the universe and absolutely devoid of human passions; (c) or mixed some attributes of Parmenides’ god with those ascribed to One by his follower Melissus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".