(N.B. This entry complements our entry “Aidos Before What Is: On Homer and Parmenides“)
Michel Briand has recently noticed a number of poetic parallelisms between Pindar and Parmenides, as regards the images they both employ.(⊙) Yet in our view, their affinity is even deeper.
Take, for example, Parmenides’s well-known fragment (our translation):
τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι
the same is to think and to be (DK B3)
Pindar writes in turn (our translation hereinafter):
Χάρις δ᾽, ἅπερ ἅπαντα τεύχει τὰ μείλιχα θνατοῖς
The charm [of words,] which makes all things sweet to [us,] mortals (Olympian 1.30)(⊗)
Notice that the adjective “sweet,” (μείλιχος, meilichos), applied here to “all things sung,” is also applied in the epod of Pythian 8 (vv. 96-97), to man’s “vital time” (αἰών, aion) when Zeus’s light reaches him. There is no coincidence in this. For it can be argued that human words reflect Zeus’s light:
ἀείδετο δὲ πὰν τέμενος τερπναῖσι θαλίαις / τὸν ἐγκώμιον ἀμφὶ τρόπον. / ἀρχαῖς δὲ προτέραις ἑπόμενοι καί νυν ἐπωνυμίαν χάριν / νίκας ἀγερώχου κελαδησόμεθα βροντάν / καὶ πυρπάλαμον βέλος / ὀρσικτύπου Διός, / ἐν ἅπαντι κράτει / αἴθωνα κεραυνὸν ἀραρότα·
the whole sacred precinct / knelled in delightful joy with hymns of praise. / Following the ancient principles / we, too, moved by victory’s proud charm, / [want to] sing to Zeus’s thunder and blazing bolt, / the lightning which is one with all might. (Olympian 10.76-83)(⦶)
Indeed, as we have seen here, Zeus is everything, in the sense that it is everything’s essential “gleam.” It is not so much that he brings things into being (the Greek gods, let us repeat it once more, are not persons, supernatural or otherwise) but that “he” is the being of all things. That is to say, Zeus is (another name for) that of which (as we mention here) Parmenides says that, viewed in itself, it is “imperishable” (ἀνώλεθρον, anolethron), “one” (ἕν, hen) “now” (νῦν ἔστιν, nun estin) “altogether” (ὁμοῦ πᾶν, homou pan) (frag. DK B8). And, like in Hölderlin – who ought to be seen as the modern Pindar – words bring forth what is as X, Y, or Z, thus allowing what is to be sung.
Put differently: Pindar puts forward a poetics of αἰδώς (aidos), i.e. of “respectful awe” before the shining forth of what is.
Consider now the three words Italicised in the previous sentence, i.e. poetics, shining forth, and being. Speaking of a poetics of αἰδώς before the shining forth of what is amounts to establish certain correspondence between them. We should like to stress, moreover, that such correspondence is ultimately based on the phonetic cum semantic equivalence between three Greek verbs: φύω (to “arise,” to “spring up,” to “be”), φαίνω (to “shine,” to “appear”), and φάναι (to “say,” to “speak”). This, ultimately, is the matrix of all early Greek thought:
It is such triangulation, one is led to think, that Pindar has in mind when he says that he wants to follow the “ancient principles” (ἀρχαὶ προτέραι, archai proterai): the conviction that, without poetry to sing it, what is would not gleam son intensely.
Thus, too, Bacchylides’s verses (our translation, as well):
φρονέοντι συνετὰ γαρύω· βαθὺς μὲν / αἰθὴρ ἀμίαντος· ὕδωρ δὲ πόντου / οὐ σάπεται· εὐφροσύνα δ᾽ ὁ χρυσός· / ἀνδρὶ δ᾽ οὐ θέμις, πολιὸν π[αρ]έντα / γῆρας, θάλειαν αὖτις ἀγκομίσσαι / ἥβαν. ἀρετᾶ[ς γε μ]ὲν οὐ μινύθει / βροτῶν ἅμα σ[ώμα]τι φέγγος, ἀλλὰ / Μοῦσά νιν τρ[έφει].
I speak understandable words for the wise: / the depths of the air remain untainted, / the water of the sea does not corrupt itself, / and gold is a joy [to see]; / but man is not allowed to escape the old age and to recover the plentiful youth. / And yet excellence gleams not less when mortals’ bodies do: / it is nourished by the Muse. (Ode 3.85-92)
(⊙) Michel Briand, “Pindar et Parménide, poètes et penseurs : jeux de métaphores et effets pragmatiques,” Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 46/2 (2020): 75-104.
(⊗) The charm of “words”: μῦθοι, in the previous verse (29).
(⦶) Dirce: a nymph devoted to Dionysus and wife of Lycus, king of Thebes (the capital of Pindar’s homeland Boeotia), after whom a spring was named therein and whose name was often employed metonymically in antiquity, moreover, to denote the city.