Parmenides: The Road Beyond the Gates of Night

The Measure of the Man

Socrates met Parmenides once, as a very young man, and Plato never let the meeting fade. In the Theaetetus Socrates refuses to examine him in passing. He borrows Helen's words for Priam from the Iliad: the old man seemed to him "venerable and awesome at once" (αἰδοῖός τέ μοι εἶναι ἅμα δεινός τε), and "he seemed to have a depth that was altogether noble" (βάθος τι ἔχειν παντάπασι γενναῖον).⁸

In Plato's Sophist he is "Parmenides the Great" (Παρμενίδης δὲ ὁ μέγας). When the Eleatic Stranger of that dialogue has to test a single point of his teaching, he first begs not to be taken for a parricide (πατραλοίας), because the argument belongs to "father Parmenides" (τοῦ πατρὸς Παρμενίδου).⁹ Aristotle, sparing with praise for his predecessors, set him above the rest of the Eleatic school: Parmenides "seems to speak with more insight" (μᾶλλον βλέπων).¹³

Even the scoffers bowed. Timon of Phlius, the Sceptic who mocked nearly every philosopher he named, spared him: "the might of high-minded Parmenides, a man of few opinions, who raised thought clear of the deceit of appearance."¹⁶ Hegel drew the line in the same place 2,300 years later: "With Parmenides philosophizing proper began; in him the ascent into the kingdom of the ideal is to be seen."³⁷

Roughly 150 lines of his poem survive. They survive because later readers kept copying them out. Sextus Empiricus preserved the opening. Simplicius, in the 6th century CE, transcribed the core of the teaching entire "on account of the rarity of Parmenides' treatise" (διὰ τὴν σπάνιν τοῦ Παρμενιδείου συγγράμματος), and for half of what survives he's the only witness.²⁴³² Those few lines gave the West its vocabulary of Being, its line between the eternal and the things that become, and its conviction that the mind can reach what truly is.

The first metaphysics of the West arrived as revelation. A Goddess spoke it, a man who had passed the gates of Night wrote it down in hexameters, and philosophy has been answering it for 2,500 years.

Elea: A City Founded on Apollo's Word

Παρμενίδης was born at Elea, which its founders called Hyele (Ὑέλη), a Greek city on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy. The founders were Phocaeans from Ionia who had fled the Persian conquest. Herodotus reports that they took the site after a man of Poseidonia explained what the Pythia at Delphi had meant: she'd ordered them to found a cult of Kyrnos the hero, and they had mistaken him for the island of the same name.⁵ Parmenides' city began as the right reading of an oracle of Apollo.

His father was Pyres, his family illustrious and wealthy. Diogenes Laertius records that he heard Xenophanes and then parted from him. He attached himself to Ameinias son of Diochaitas, a Pythagorean, "a poor man, but noble and good," and when Ameinias died, Parmenides built him a hero-shrine (ἡρῷον). It was Ameinias, the same report says, who turned him to stillness (εἰς ἡσυχίαν προετράπη).¹⁶ In the Pythagorean vocabulary, stillness named a whole way of life.³²

Plato dates him precisely. He sets the visit to Athens at the Great Panathenaea, with Parmenides "already quite old, very grey, but fair and noble to look on, about 65," Zeno close to 40, and Socrates "very young."¹⁰ That places his birth around 515 BCE. Diogenes, following Apollodorus, puts his prime in the 69th Olympiad (504-501 BCE).¹⁶

He gave Elea its laws. Speusippus, Plato's nephew and successor, said so in his book on the philosophers.¹⁶ Plutarch supplies the civic detail: "Parmenides ordered his own homeland with the best laws, so that every year the magistrates bind the citizens by oath to abide by the laws of Parmenides."²⁰ Strabo credits Parmenides and Zeno, "Pythagorean men," with the good order that let small Elea stand firm against the Lucanians and the Poseidonians.¹⁸ The school grew around him. Zeno, Apollodorus reports, was the son of Teleutagoras by birth and of Parmenides by adoption (θέσει δὲ Παρμενίδου), and Melissus of Samos came to hear him.¹⁶

The Stone of Velia

Excavations at Velia, the Roman name of Elea, brought up a herm inscribed with his name in 1962, and in 1966 a portrait head that fits it. The monument dates from the 1st century CE.³² In the same building stood a statue and herms of men named Oulis, each titled "physician and pholarch," dated by an era that ran back at least 446 years. A fragmentary inscription from the site names Apollo as physician-prophet (ἰατρόμαντις).³²³³³⁴

ΠΑ[Ρ]ΜΕΝΕΙΔΗΣ ΠΥΡΗΤΟΣ ΟΥΛΙΑΔΗΣ ΦΥΣΙΚΟΣ
"Parmenides son of Pyres, Ouliades, natural philosopher."

Οὖλις Εὐξίνου Ὑελήτης ἰατρὸς φώλαρχος ἔτει τοθ´
"Oulis son of Euxinos, of Hyele, physician, pholarch, in the 379th year."

Inscribed herm of Parmenides and statue base of Oulis, Velia, 1st century CE.³²

The name Οὐλιάδης comes from Apollo's title Οὔλιος, the Healer. Strabo explains the epithet: the Milesians and the Delians call on Apollo Oulios "as the giver of health and healing, for οὔλειν means to be healthy."¹⁹ The title φώλαρχος is built on φωλεός, the den where animals lie motionless through the winter. Nutton glossed it as the leader of a society, above all a philosophical school.³⁴ Peter Kingsley read the whole find as the record of a line of healer-priests of Apollo who practiced incubation, lying still in darkness to receive vision and cure, with Parmenides at its head.³⁵

Zevism takes the record as it stands. Half a millennium after his death, his own city honored Parmenides at the head of a lineage that carried the name of Apollo the Healer.

The Road Beyond the Gates of Night

The poem opens in motion: "The mares that carry me, as far as my spirit might reach, were bearing me on, once they had set me on the far-famed road of the Goddess, the road that carries the man who knows" (εἰδότα φῶτα).¹ The axle glows in its sockets and shrieks like a pipe. The Daughters of the Sun (Ἡλιάδες κοῦραι) lead the chariot. They've left the halls of Night (δώματα Νυκτός) for the light and pushed the veils back from their heads.¹

They reach "the gates of the paths of Night and Day" (πύλαι Νυκτός τε καὶ Ἤματός εἰσι κελεύθων), set in a lintel and a stone threshold and filled with great doors. Dike, "of many penalties" (πολύποινος), holds the keys that open and lock them (κληῖδας ἀμοιβούς). The maidens persuade her with soft words. She thrusts back the bolt, the doors swing open on a yawning chasm (χάσμ’ ἀχανές), and the chariot drives straight through.¹

Hesiod had already placed that threshold at the edge of Tartarus. There, at the house of Night, Night and Day "greet each other as they pass the great bronze threshold."⁶ Parmenides' chariot crosses the point where the cosmic powers change watch.

The Goddess receives him kindly and takes his right hand in hers. Her greeting states what has happened:

ὦ κοῦρ’ ἀθανάτοισι συνάορος ἡνιόχοισιν,
ἵπποις ταί σε φέρουσιν ἱκάνων ἡμέτερον δῶ,
χαῖρ’, ἐπεὶ οὔτι σε μοῖρα κακὴ προὔπεμπε νέεσθαι
τήνδ’ ὁδόν (ἦ γὰρ ἀπ’ ἀνθρώπων ἐκτὸς πάτου ἐστίν),
ἀλλὰ θέμις τε δίκη τε.
"Youth, companion of immortal charioteers, who reach our house with the mares that carry you: welcome. No evil fate sent you to travel this road, for it lies far from the beaten track of men. Themis and Dike sent you."

Parmenides, DK 28 B1.24-28¹

Then she sets out the program: "You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of well-rounded Truth (Ἀληθείης εὐκυκλέος ἀτρεμὲς ἦτορ) and the opinions of mortals, in which there's no true trust."¹ From here to the end of the poem, every argument about Being is spoken by the Goddess. The man reports. The divine teaches. Her name is withheld: she is θεά, the Goddess, and the surviving verses never name her.

What kind of road is this? Walter Burkert argued in 1969 that its images belong to the descent to the underworld, the κατάβασις of the Pythagorean tradition.³⁶ Kingsley read it as the record of an incubation in the Apolline line of Elea.³⁵ Sextus Empiricus, who preserved the proem, read it as the soul's own ascent. For him the mares are "the irrational impulses and desires of the soul," and the road of the Goddess is "contemplation according to philosophical reason," which leads, like an escorting daimon, to the knowledge of all things.²²

Zevism holds the 3 readings together, because they describe a single ascent. Sextus' mares are the horses of the soul that Plato yoked in the Phaedrus and that the Zevist teaching of the Chariot of the Soul trains under the charioteer. The road "far from the beaten track of men" is the initiate's road. And Aristotle's fragment on the Mysteries, cited on the Temple's page on Aristotle, names the principle: the initiate's task is παθεῖν, to undergo, where the student's is μαθεῖν, to learn.¹⁵ Parmenides underwent, then taught.

The Revelation: The Signs of Being

The Goddess names the only roads of inquiry there are to think. The first: "that it is, and that it's impossible for it not to be" (ὅπως ἔστιν τε καὶ ὡς οὐκ ἔστι μὴ εἶναι). That's "the path of Persuasion, for she attends on Truth." The second, "that it is not," is a track "wholly without tidings," since what is not can't be known or spoken.²

Mortals wander a third track that mixes both. The Goddess calls them "two-headed" (δίκρανοι), "deaf and blind alike, dazed, undiscerning tribes," who hold being and not-being the same and not the same.² Against habit and "the aimless eye and the echoing ear," she commands: "judge by reason (λόγῳ) the much-contested refutation spoken by me."²

Then fragment 8 lays out 61 continuous lines, preserved entire by Simplicius. On the road of "it is," the Goddess says, there are "very many signs" (σήματ’ ... πολλὰ μάλ’).³²⁴ Each sign is a property of Being. Each became a property of the divine in the tradition that followed.

Ungenerated and Imperishable

Fragment 8.3-21: ἀγένητον καὶ ἀνώλεθρον

"Being is ungenerated and imperishable" (ἀγένητον ἐὸν καὶ ἀνώλεθρόν ἐστιν). It can't come from what is not, since what is not can't even be said or thought. "Therefore Dike holds it fast and never loosens her fetters to let it come to be or perish" (οὔτε γενέσθαι οὔτ’ ὄλλυσθαι ἀνῆκε Δίκη χαλάσασα πέδῃσιν, ἀλλ’ ἔχει). So "coming-to-be is extinguished, and perishing unheard of."³

For Zevism: the divine source has no birth and no death. What is has always been.

The Eternal Now

Fragment 8.5-6: νῦν ἔστιν ὁμοῦ πᾶν

"It never was, nor will it be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous" (οὐδέ ποτ’ ἦν οὐδ’ ἔσται, ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν ὁμοῦ πᾶν, ἕν, συνεχές). Past and future fall away. Being has a present and nothing else. Plato built his doctrine of eternity on this line: "was" and "will be" belong to the things that come to be in time, and "is" alone belongs to eternal being.³¹¹

For Zevism: this is the present that meditation reaches for, a stillness in which nothing waits to happen.

One, Continuous, Full

Fragment 8.22-25: ἕν, συνεχές, ἔμπλεον

Being can't be divided, "since it's all alike." There's no more of it here and less of it there. "All of it is full of what is" (πᾶν δ’ ἔμπλεόν ἐστιν ἐόντος), and "what is draws near to what is" (ἐὸν γὰρ ἐόντι πελάζει).³

For Zevism: the One is plenitude. The unity Zevism teaches is a fullness in which the many Gods stand, with no void between them.

Unshaken

Fragment 8.26-31: ἀκίνητον, ἀτρεμές

"Unmoved in the limits of great bonds," Being "remains the same, in the same, and rests by itself, and so stays fixed where it is; for mighty Necessity holds it in the bonds of the limit that fences it round" (κρατερὴ γὰρ Ἀνάγκη πείρατος ἐν δεσμοῖσιν ἔχει, τό μιν ἀμφὶς ἐέργει).³ Xenophanes had said as much of the greatest God: "always he remains in the same place, moving not at all" (αἰεὶ δ’ ἐν ταὐτῷ μίμνει κινούμενος οὐδέν).⁷

For Zevism: the unshaken heart (ἀτρεμὲς ἦτορ) of Truth is the pattern for the unshaken heart of the practitioner.

Complete, Like a Well-Rounded Sphere

Fragment 8.32-33, 42-49: εὐκύκλου σφαίρης ἐναλίγκιον

"It isn't lawful (θέμις) for what is to be incomplete, for it lacks nothing." Since there's a furthest limit, "it is completed on every side, like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally balanced from the middle in every direction" (τετελεσμένον ἐστί πάντοθεν, εὐκύκλου σφαίρης ἐναλίγκιον ὄγκῳ, μεσσόθεν ἰσοπαλὲς πάντῃ).³

For Zevism: the limit (πεῖρας) here is completion. Zevism calls such a limit a shore, the true edge of a finished thing, and sets it against the mold, a constraint forced on a thing from outside. Parmenides' Being has a shore and no mold.

Held by Dike, Ananke and Moira

Fragment 8.13-15, 30-31, 37-38: Δίκη, Ἀνάγκη, Μοῖρα

Being has 3 divine guardians. Dike holds it in fetters. Ananke holds it in the bonds of the limit. Moira "bound it to be whole and unmoved" (Μοῖρ’ ἐπέδησεν οὖλον ἀκίνητόν τ’ ἔμεναι).³ The Dike who fetters Being is the same Dike who keeps the keys of the gates in the proem.

For Zevism: Justice is cosmic before it's civic. The Goddess who opens the road for the soul is the Goddess who holds Being in place.

Together the signs describe Being. The later tradition read in them the attributes of God: without birth, without death, whole, unshaken, complete, and held by Justice.

Thinking and Being Are the Same

At the center of the revelation stands a single line: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι, "for thinking and being are the same."² The Goddess returns to it in fragment 8: "thinking and that for which there is thought are the same, for you won't find thinking without what is, in which it has been expressed."³ Fragment 4 turns the principle into a discipline: "look at things absent as firmly present to the mind" (λεῦσσε δ’ ὅμως ἀπεόντα νόῳ παρεόντα βεβαίως).²

Theophrastus took him to teach that soul and mind are the same.¹⁶ Plotinus went further. In the Enneads he writes that Parmenides had already touched the doctrine of the 3 divine natures "in that he brought Being and Mind together into the same, and didn't place Being among the things of sense," and he quotes fragment 3. When Parmenides calls Being unmoved, Plotinus adds, he frees it of all bodily motion "so that it may remain always the same," and he likens it to a sphere "because it holds all things encompassed, and its thinking is within itself."²⁵

Here the chain reaches Zeus. Plato writes in the Philebus that in the nature of Zeus there come to be "a kingly soul and a kingly mind" (βασιλικὴν μὲν ψυχήν, βασιλικὸν δὲ νοῦν).¹² Plotinus reads the passage as a statement about the divine order: Zeus is "great Mind" (νοῦς ἐστι μέγας), and he ranks him with Mind among the first causes.²⁶ Aristotle's God, "thought thinking itself" (νόησις νοήσεως), stands on the same line.¹⁴ Where Parmenides says that thinking and being are one, Zevism reads the kingly Nous of Zeus, the Mind in which all that is, is known.

If thinking and being are the same, then the mind that thinks what truly is already stands inside Being. That's the metaphysical warrant for ὁμοίωσις θεῷ: likeness to God takes place in the Nous, because the Nous is where Being is.

The Cosmos of Opinion and the Goddess Who Steers

With Truth complete, the Goddess turns: "Here I end my trustworthy account and thought about Truth. From here learn the opinions of mortals, listening to the deceptive order (κόσμον) of my words."³ She then gives a full cosmology built on 2 forms: Light, the gentle and ethereal fire, and Night, dense and heavy.³⁴ She also says why she teaches it: "so that no mortal judgment may ever outstrip you."³

This cosmos is full of Gods. "In the middle of these is the Goddess who steers all things" (ἐν δὲ μέσῳ τούτων δαίμων ἣ πάντα κυβερνᾷ), ruling birth and union.⁴ Aetius reports that Parmenides called her "the steering Goddess and key-holder, Dike and Ananke" (δαίμονα κυβερνῆτιν καὶ κλῃδοῦχον).²³ The key-holder of the gates returns as the steerer of the cosmos. "First of all the Gods she devised Eros" (πρώτιστον μὲν Ἔρωτα θεῶν μητίσατο πάντων), a line Aristotle quotes when he places Parmenides beside Hesiod among those who made love a first principle of things.⁴¹³

The same poem watched the sky with an exact eye. It calls the moon "shining by night, wandering round the earth, a borrowed light" (νυκτιφαὲς περὶ γαῖαν ἀλώμενον ἀλλότριον φῶς), "always gazing toward the rays of the sun."⁴ Ancient reports credit him with the first statement that the earth is a sphere, and with the discovery that the Evening Star and the Morning Star are one body.¹⁶ The seer of Being observed the heavens with precision.

Human thought has its place in this cosmos too. "As each holds the blend of the much-wandering limbs, so mind stands present to men" (τὼς νόος ἀνθρώποισι παρίσταται).⁴ The mortal mind shifts with the mixture of the body. The mind the Goddess trains holds still on what is, and that stillness has to be won against the body's drift.

For Zevism the Doctrine of Opinion carries the teaching on the One and the Many. Being is one. The world of appearance holds many powers, ordered by a Goddess who steers and by Eros, first of the Gods she devised. Xenophanes had already sung "one God, greatest among Gods and men" (εἷς θεός, ἔν τε θεοῖσι καὶ ἀνθρώποισι μέγιστος).⁷ The One rules the Gods from within their company. Zevism's teaching on the One God and the many Gods finds its early Greek statement here.

The Golden Chain: From Elea to the Last Platonists

The teaching didn't stay in Elea. It passed through 4 channels, and each widened it.

Proclus stated the verdict of the whole line. A chapter of his Platonic Theology refers "the whole truth about the Gods in Plato" to the single dialogue that bears Parmenides' name, and calls its teaching "nothing other than the generation of the Gods, hymned."²⁷ He opened his commentary on that dialogue with a prayer "to all the Gods and Goddesses" to guide his mind.²⁸ The chain that began with a Goddess taking a man's right hand ended, nearly 1,000 years later, with a philosopher praying to all the Gods before he read.

Τό τε οὖν ὅλον καὶ τέλειον τῆς θεολογικῆς ἐπιστήμης φῶς ὁ Παρμενίδης ἀνάπτει τοῖς τοῦ Πλάτωνος ἐρασταῖς.
"The Parmenides kindles for the lovers of Plato the whole and perfect light of theological science."

Proclus, Platonic Theology I.7²⁷

What Parmenides Gives Zevism

Plotinus said of the doctrines of the One, Mind and Soul that they "were spoken long ago, though not unfolded," and are neither new nor of today (μὴ καινοὺς μηδὲ νῦν, ἀλλὰ πάλαι μὲν εἰρῆσθαι μὴ ἀναπεπταμένως). A few lines later he named Parmenides.²⁵ That's Zevism's rule of the source. Knowledge travels and grows in transmission, and the source keeps priority. Parmenides is a source in the strict sense: the earliest surviving teaching on Being, delivered as revelation and received as theology for 1,000 years. It reaches every dimension of the Zevist path.

Meditation: The Unshaken Heart

Ameinias turned him to stillness. The Goddess teaches the unshaken heart of Truth. Fragment 4 trains the mind to hold the absent as present, and adds that the mind "won't cut off what is from holding to what is" (οὐ γὰρ ἀποτμήξει τὸ ἐὸν τοῦ ἐόντος ἔχεσθαι). Trained attention finds Being continuous, with no gap for distraction to enter. Being is unmoved, and the practitioner stills the mind until it can mirror what is. The pholarchs of Velia took their title from the den where life lies motionless. Zevist meditation builds δυνατόν, the capacity of power, and Parmenides shows where that power rests: in a stillness that nothing shakes.

Ethics: Dike Holds the Keys

Justice stands at every decisive point of the poem. Dike keeps the keys of the gates. Dike, with Themis, sent him on the road. Dike holds Being in fetters. Even inside Being the rule is Themis: "it isn't lawful for what is to be incomplete."³ The man who received the teaching wrote laws his city swore to keep every year. Plato's formula for likeness to God joins the same terms: "to become just and holy with wisdom" (δίκαιον καὶ ὅσιον μετὰ φρονήσεως γενέσθαι).⁸ Zevism defines the Good as the conjunction of Maat and Right. In Parmenides a single Dike governs the order of Being and opens the road to the one who comes rightly.

The Existential Dimension: The Road Apart from Men

The Goddess marks the road as lying "far from the beaten track of men." She forbids him to let "habit born of much experience" (ἔθος πολύπειρον) force him onto the road of the two-headed, who are "carried along, deaf and blind alike."² The life lived in service of ὁμοίωσις θεῷ is chosen on the road of "it is," against the drift of the crowd. Parmenides lived it that way: in stillness, in law, and in the company of a Goddess.

Theurgy: The Goddess Teaches

The entire doctrine is spoken by a Goddess who takes a mortal by the right hand. The line that carried it is Apolline from end to end. Elea rose on the Pythia's word. Its founder was remembered as Ouliades, at the head of healers who bore the name of Apollo Oulios. Plato, whom Athens remembered as born on Apollo's birthday after his father saw a vision of Apollo, called Parmenides father.¹⁷ Proclus prayed to all the Gods before he opened the dialogue. Theurgy joins human intelligence to the intelligence of the Gods, and fragment 3 states why the joining is possible.

Nothing Comes from Nothing

The Goddess forbids the thought of a beginning from nothing: "I won't allow you to say or think that it came from what is not" (οὔτ’ ἐκ μὴ ἐόντος ἐάσσω φάσθαι σ’ οὐδὲ νοεῖν).³ The Hebrew text of Genesis describes a darkness and a deep already present when the work begins.³⁰ The doctrine of creation out of nothing was fixed only in the late 2nd century CE, when Christian apologists such as Theophilus of Antioch wrote against Plato's uncreated matter to impose it.³¹³⁸ Zevism keeps the Goddess' rule. The divine source doesn't manufacture existence out of a void. What is, is eternal.

The road Parmenides rode is still open. It runs through the gates of Night, past the keeping of Dike, to a Goddess who teaches that what is can't fail to be, and that the mind which thinks it truly stands where Being stands. Zevism walks that road back to its source.

Plato called him father. Zevism calls him a source.

Objections and Replies

Objection I: "Parmenides was a logician. The Goddess and the chariot are poetic decoration."

The strongest form of this objection says the argument of fragment 8 stands on its own, so the religious frame can be stripped away without loss. The text refuses the operation. The proem runs 32 lines, and the Goddess it introduces speaks every argument that follows. The proem calls its traveler "the man who knows," and the Goddess sets his road "far from the beaten track of men." The ancient readers who held the whole poem read the frame as substance. Sextus, a Sceptic reporting the doctrines of others, still read the chariot as the soul's ascent by reason.²² Proclus wrote a full chapter against readers who called Plato's Parmenides a logical exercise (λογικόν).²⁷ The arguments are rigorous. They're also revealed, and the tradition that received them never separated the 2.

Objection II: "His Being is a frozen block. It abolishes the world, motion, and the Gods."

Fragment 3 identifies Being with thinking, and a frozen block doesn't think. Plotinus read the unmoved sphere as Mind whose thinking is "within itself."²⁵ The Goddess calls Being "full" and says it "lacks nothing." She then teaches the cosmos of Light and Night herself, with a steering Goddess at its center and Eros first among the Gods.⁴ When Plato's Stranger commits his "parricide," what he adds to "perfect being" (τῷ παντελῶς ὄντι) is motion, life, soul and wisdom, while Plato keeps Being eternal in the Timaeus.⁹¹¹ The correction happened inside the family. The son completed the father's Being with life. Aristotle's God, "a living being, eternal, most good," carries the same line forward into the Lyceum.¹⁴

Objection III: "The priest-healer Parmenides rests on Roman inscriptions carved 500 years after his death."

The monument dates from the 1st century CE. Granted. It's also the testimony of Parmenides' own city, set in a building whose inscriptions reckon an era reaching back at least 446 years, and it names him with an Apolline title.³² Οὐλιάδης is attested as a name from the 5th century BCE: Plutarch names an Ouliades of Samos among the Ionian leaders of 478 BCE.²¹³² Coxon, editing the fragments, judged the title a survival or revival of an older local tradition, its tie to Apollo an aspect of Parmenides' Pythagoreanism.³² Strabo glosses Apollo Oulios as the Healer in the cults of Miletus and Delos, Ionian cities like Phocaea, the mother city of Elea.¹⁹ The older witnesses point the same way: Sotion on his conversion to stillness, Speusippus on his laws, Strabo on the Pythagorean good order of Elea, and the poem itself, which opens with a Goddess and seals Truth under Dike, Ananke and Moira. The inscription confirms what the text already says.