Revista Archai

Translation of Phaedrus' Speech in Plato's Symposium (Pl. Smp. 178a-180c)

Fernanda Israel Pio — 2024-09-02

In Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus is recognized as the "father of discourse" and occupies the first seat on the left. He introduces the theme of love, commencing his discourse with a series of references to tradition, including figures like Hesiod, Acusilaus, and Parmenides, to extol Eros. Phaedrus underscores the role of love in war, politics, and amorous relationships, emphasizing how love motivates humans to act exceptionally. His argument culminates in the notion that the pinnacle of love is the willingness to die for those we love. He illustrates this perspective with examples of couples: Alcestis and Admetus, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Achilles and Patroclus, demonstrating how love is inherently linked to death and how this sacrifice is rewarded by the gods. This translation highlights specific terms used in pederastic contexts, such as erastes and eromenos, through transliteration, distinguishing them from more generic terms for lovers and loved ones. The introduction briefly addresses how the understanding of pederastic relationships and issues related to the gender of the characters can influence the interpretation of the discourse. This translation invites readers to undertake a meticulous analysis of Phaedrus's discourse, exploring the complexities discussed and their implications for the understanding of love in Plato's work.

Review of TORRANO, J. (2022) Eurípides. Teatro Completo II: Os Heraclidas, Hipólito, Andrômaca, Hécuba. São Paulo, Editora 34

Rodolfo José Rocha Rachid — 2024-06-03

Review of TORRANO, J. (2022) Eurípides. Teatro Completo II: Os Heraclidas, Hipólito, Andrômaca, Hécuba. São Paulo, Editora 34.

Style Matters in Presocratic Philosophy, an introduction

Celso Vieira — 2024-09-02

What we envisaged as a dossier to explore the connection between style and philosophy in this unique transitional period of Presocratic philosophy has turned out to be a volume that breaks with several conventional views of the Presocratics and has the potential to take the interpretation of style and Presocratic philosophy in a whole new and more fruitful direction.

Assertion and Argument in Xenophanes

James H. Lesher — 2024-09-02

It is a commonplace in our histories of Greek philosophy that the first thinker to fashion deductive arguments was Parmenides of Elea. One corollary of this view is that Ionian philosophers before Parmenides provided no arguments in support of their views. In what follows I offer a critique of this dismissive characterization, focusing on the first thinker for whom we have a substantial body of evidence, Xenophanes of Colophon. Specifically, Xenophanes argued that retelling the old stories of divine strife and warfare was out of keeping with the qualities of cleanliness and purity considered essential to a proper symposium. He held also that the presence of fossilized remains at inland and mountainous locations was best explained by positing cycles of worldwide flooding and drought, and he linked many other phenomena with the presence of earth and/or water. He also distinguished between having direct perceptual access to events and knowing the clear and sure truth about them, and concluded that about far-off matters such as the gods and the nature of all things no man can know the certain truth. He held also that a series of contrasts between divine and human attributes followed from an initial assumption of divine greatness.

Xenophanes’ Metres

Tom Mackenzie — 2024-09-02

Perhaps the most obvious and, for us, the most surprising stylistic feature of Xenophanes’ surviving fragments is the fact that they were written in verse. Whilst this general feature has received much comment and explanation, a more fine-grained analysis of his use of metre has been somewhat lacking. There are at least two factors which have contributed to this lack: first, the primarily philosophical focus of most modern scholarship on Xenophanes, which has been more interested in content than form; and second, the dominance of New Historicism in archaic Greek literary scholarship of recent decades, which, with its emphasis on the ideological force and social role of early Greek hexameter and elegy, has also tended to eschew an analysis of precise formal features. When we do find detailed discussion of metre, it tends to be in the service of uncovering the composition-processes of poets, rather than elucidating the effects they aimed to generate. Consequently, the present contribution aims to fill a gap in Xenophanean scholarship by enriching our appreciation of his sometimes-maligned metrical artistry (M.L. West described him and Euenus as ‘the clumsiest versifiers’ out of the elegists and iambicists). It thus joins two trends in recent Greek literary scholarship: the renewed attempt to appreciate archaic texts as literature – rather than merely as documents for social history or historical anthropology; and the exploration of the significance of non-semantic formal features, which can convey as much ideological content as the claims, narratives and imagery of the text.

Markedness Neutralisation and the Unity of Opposites in Heraclitus

Keith Begley — 2024-09-02

In this article, I shed new light on a misunderstood aspect of Heraclitus’ style. The opposites employed by Heraclitus are often of equal status except that one member of each pair may also appear as a designation for the encompassing whole. I begin by discussing two interpretations of this phenomenon, which were put forward by Roman Dilcher and Alexander Mourelatos. The phenomenon is, I suggest, better understood as being an example of what is known as markedness neutralisation. I argue that this phenomenon should be interpreted as further undermining what Mourelatos identified as a naïve paratactic metaphysics of mere things (NMT), to which Heraclitus was reacting by beginning to develop a hypotactic metaphysics of hierarchies and dependencies as part of a view of the world as being logos-textured. Further, I consider a series of three problems that were put forward by Dilcher, which he thinks must be addressed by anyone who claims that Heraclitus held a unity of opposites thesis. I also consider some related issues, and provide some responses.

On the interdependence between contents and literary forms in Parmenides’ Poem

Alexandre Costa — 2024-09-02

Starting from the identification and characterization of three literary forms that coexist throughout Parmenides’ Poem, all of them plainly different from each other, it is proposed and demonstrated that such a variety of forms mirrors the delimitation of the different ways of thought and language elaborated by Parmenidic philosophy, in which at least two types of nature of knowledge must be recognized: the logical and the cosmological. The first, marked by a formally logical-argumentative speech which is given the name of truth (aletheia) and whose way of thinking is exclusively noetic; the second, of a theoretical-descriptive nature, dedicated to the consideration of the movement proper to cosmic phenomena, whose devenir demands an equally mobile way of thinking (phronein).

On the Counterpoint of Rhythm and Meter: Poetics of Dislocation and Anomalous Versification in Parmenides’ Poem

Bernardo Berruecos Frank — 2024-09-02

In ancient times, authors such as Plutarch and Proclus questioned Parmenides’ abilities as a poet considering his Poem to be ‘prose in disguise’. Harsh judgments concerning Parmenides’ style are pervasive even in modern scholarship (Diels 1897, Wilamowitz 1912, Tarán 1977, Kirk & Raven 1977). This paper focuses on specific metrical and rhythmic devices used consistently in the composition of the Poem, that I will refer to, collectively, as ‘poetic dislocation’. This term encompasses the

blurring and cancellation of the central caesura, the tendency to break Hermann’s bridge with varying degrees of intensity, the accumulation of enjambment in groups of verses, the use of non-traditional lexicon of the epic genre and the placement of Homeric lexicon in non-Homeric hexameter collocations. My attempt is to prove that these procedures are an integral part of Parmenides’ poetic style. I will also present an analysis of Parmenides’ versification focusing on the rhythmic patterns and the organization of caesura, especially in fr. B8.

Melissus’ and Zeno’s deductive speech

Mathilde Brémond — 2024-09-02

This paper explores the prosaic deductive style developed by Melissus and Zeno. It first emphasizes the authors’ use of a systematic and reduced vocabulary solely dedicated to a priori deduction. In a second time, the paper delves into the systematic role of reductio ad absurdum in their reasoning and distinguishes several kinds of reductio employed by the authors. Through this analysis, the study shows how Melissus and Zeno not only developed and systematized certain aspects of Parmenides’ style but also introduced original features that significantly influenced the philosophical writing style.

Equivocal and Deceitful Didactic Poetry. What Style matters can say about Empedocles' audience

Ilaria Andolfi — 2024-09-02

Since antiquity, Empedocles has been considered as an example of both successful and unsuccessful communication. Aristotle credits him with vividness of images, but blames him for failure of clarity, and eventually compares his obscureness to that of oracles. Therefore, scholars in the past came to the conclusion that Empedocles deliberately employs an opaque style, like Heraclitus and his "studied ambiguity", as means for initiation. This paper challenges this assumption and asks whether and how ambiguity can work within a didactic poem. By showing how Empedocles' and Heraclitus' communicative strategies differ from one another, I shall point to the poet's role as a charismatic and spiritual guide, displaying at times a Sibyl-like attitude. Being a mediator between two separate dimensions puts Empedocles in an ambiguous position, because he delivers what the Muse and the gods made available for him to share, and so his opaqueness does not come directly from him. Ultimately, this style analysis also says something about who the ideal audience must have been.

How to name invisible principles? The challenge of naming what the eyes cannot see

Miriam Campolina Diniz Peixoto — 2024-09-02

What were the guidelines that the ancient atomists followed when coining new terms to name their principles? To what extent the difficulty of apprehension and understanding of the nature of their principles would justify the use of more than one term for naming the same thing? Some modern scholars tend to reduce the “indivisible” to a mere formal principle, while other scholars insist in considering the “indivisible” as a material principle. Can anyone find in the ancient texts sufficient elements to evaluate these claims without losing sight of the particular horizon of inquiry and conceptual universe of Presocratic philosophy? I intend to map the problem of the names assigned to the principles in the atomists' thought in order to formulate a few hypotheses concerning some issues that seem to underlie the transmission and the reception of their thought in antiquity.

False pleasures, good friendships

Marco Zingano — 2024-09-03

In this paper, we aim to explore Aristotle’s analysis of friendship by examining its three objects of friendship - virtue, utility, and pleasure. We will also explain why these three objects of friendship pose a challenge to defining friendship as a common and singular entity, namely, as a reciprocal and conscious benevolence that has practical effects. It is shown that the objects of friendship are part and parcel of the kind of personal relationship friendship is, making it impossible to provide a common definition.