The celebrated ‘Fondazione Lorenzo Valla’ series finally has its Presocratics, and the community of readers, academic and otherwise, a new translated and annotated edition.
The volume is arranged as follows: a substantial introduction (pp. XV-LXXXIX) is followed by a selective but extensive bibliography (pp. XCIII-CXII), followed by texts and translations of: Thales (3-27); Anaximander (29-61); Anaximenes (63-87); Pythagoras and the ancient Pythagoreans, with a section devoted to Philolaus (89-303); Xenophanes (305-353); Heraclitus (355-451). The last part contains notes on Thales (455-459), Anaximander (460-467), Anaximenes (468-473), Pythagoras and the ancient Pythagoreans (474-527), Xenophanes (528-544), Heraclitus (545-606). The volume is closed by concordance tables with Diels-Kranz edition and, for fragments absent there, with Wöhrle for the Milesians, Giangiulio and Huffman for Pythagoreans and Philolaus, Laks-Most for Pythagoreans and Heraclitus, Marcovich for Heraclitus (609-613).
Some fragments and testimonies are absent from other editions (e.g., Heracl. PFlor. II 115, B 1-2 Manetti ‘nature investigates itself’, and 18 testimonies on Pythagoras and the Pythagorens are added). For each author, text and translation are preceded by a specific introduction on biography, works, audience, context and content. The edition does not include all the authors covered by Diels’ Vorsokratiker, but a selection of the most significant figures, namely those for whom the quantity and quality of the testimonies make it possible to outline a reliable historical and doctrinal profile.
The work is based on the German edition of 2009,[1] but the numerous revisions and updates, reassessments and reworkings are such as to give this edition its own identity, especially with regard to some of the authors, such as Heraclitus. This volume is the first of three, with the next ones planned for 2024 and 2025. The decision of the publisher to rely on Laura Gemelli Marciano has ensured philological accuracy, perceptive translations, and above all a welcome and undisguised originality of interpretation.
The bibliography on the so-called Presocratics, endless in its own right,[2] has grown a great deal since, with valuable contributions and collections, and remarkable editions of authors who constitute indirect sources for the Presocratic tradition, such as Mansfeld and Runia’s Aëtiana.[3] There have been new translations (sometimes largely based on earlier works) and commentaries. In more than one case, however, it is difficult to escape the impression that, as is typical of an age of compilations and erudition, these are collections of material devoid of motivation and sifting, whose main objective is completeness, quantity or, alternatively, fine detail: so fine that its relevance becomes imperceptible. We are in a time that resounds with a new classicism, prone to laborious, but also repetitive conceptual paths that far from being the result of a painstaking confrontation with the original revolve around exegetical clichés that they contribute to perpetuate.
The edition under consideration stands out. The exegetical suffering of which it is the result is evident, and evident is the urgency of its interpretative proposal, as it appears already from the first pages of the Introduction: a proposal characterised by a backward-looking gaze aimed at removing, as far as possible, the decisive filter exercised by modern philosophy, in particular the powerful tradition that can be traced back to Hegel and Schleiermacher, and to the idea of a Geist (whatever this may be) unfolding throughout history and yet independently of history. Another hindrance it addresses lies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical historiography, imbued as it was with Hegel’s ideas—the historiography of Eduard Zeller, to name one. To renounce these filters means, in the end, to renounce the Aristotelian approach which implies that the history of thought had a precise evolutionary direction and was to be divided by a watershed between sophia and philosophia. Pre-Socratic philosophy on this approach was interpreted as a homogeneous whole in continuous linear development, corresponding to the development of the ‘spirit’: with Zeller, this became a kind of dogma, further supported by Diels’ Vorsokratiker (see Gemelli-Marciano, p. XXI).
The very definition of ‘pre-Socratics’, unknown until the end of the 18th century and only dominant since the beginning of the 20th century, in turn played a similar role. Gemelli-Marciano does not renounce the definition, but already from the title she redefines it, as a label under which paths of wisdom should be rediscovered. It is not easy to break up an exegetic cliché of this magnitude, which has marked the cultural imagination of western culture, but the effort of conceptual and historical relocation deployed by Gemelli-Marciano is evident: the aim is to rediscover the peculiar Sitz im Leben of each figure, more usually considered by the scholarship as part of one and the same milieu, thus ruling out any possibility of a genuine understanding.
Looking back also means looking at Homer and Hesiod, at the first contacts between the Greeks and the peoples of the Near East in the mid-7th century B.C., at ritual practices and the most ancient beliefs, such as can be found both in the early pre-Socratics and in some writings attributed to Hippocrates —for example, beliefs concerning the material nature of cognitive processes such as of speech or perception. Memory is also seen as physically, and not metaphorically, preserved in the chest, specifically in the phrenes, after having been acquired by way of an experience that, as happens for the Pythagoreans (see pp. 127-128.), consists in a descent into a divine world similar to that taken by the mantis.
No unity of purpose and no shared principles are attributed in this edition to the figures we are accustomed to identify as the precursors of Socrates and Plato. To those who dig deeper and compare this book with the history of Presocratic scholarship, it is the peculiarities concerning each figure, rather than linear developments, that will appear; the distance from our cultural paradigms will emerge, together with the rediscovered colours of the ancient world as against the marmoreal, if not funereal, whiteness of neoclassicism (to draw from the history of Greek statuary shows).
What I call the colours here, because they restore vitality, Gemelli-Marciano calls the darkness of that complex matter that constitutes the surviving testimonies, the darkness that we try to illuminate by grouping the fragments according to modern categories. “Questo buio, però, è presente in questa edizione, perché proprio lì si annida l’origine non solo della sapienza, ma della nascita e della crescita dell’uomo e del cosmo, quella che la nostra civiltà occidentale, sopraffatta dai miti della razionalità, dell’efficienza e, soprattutto, della tecnologia, ha completamente dimenticato” (p. XXIV). Gemelli-Marciano adds that the words of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles, generate confusion and bewilderment and are meant to do so; they remind us that the leap into the dark and the loss of orientation are the indispensable prerequisites for freeing ourselves from the fog of inveterate habits, which blind the vision to other possible paths of research. It is a plea for giving up modern theoretical schemes and definitions for the concrete, everyday, real practices of the ancient world. The concept of shamanism as opposed to the rationalistic ideal sought by moderns in the Greek world, as mentioned (see pp. XLIX-L n. 2), clarifies the intent and the method.
This may appear provocative to some. After all, when in 1951 E. R. Dodds went so far as to reinterpret ‘outdated’ cultural models and investigate shamanism, interpreted Pythagoras and to some extent also Empedocles and Orphism in this sense and went so far as to claim the influence of this type of practice even in Plato, he provoked astonished reactions. It was said that he was going too far. What he meant, Arnaldo Momigliano said, was that research would offer ‘the means to control irrational impulses and, in the final analysis, to submit them to reason’. But this is Momigliano’s reductionism, not Dodds’. A sort of fear, of hesitation, seems to have restrained interpreters from accepting the possibility of a non-Aristotelian dimension, of an alternative to the rationalism that left its mark on the history of western culture—a s if it were a revised version of the “fear of freedom” described by Dodds himself in the last chapter of his book.
Gemelli-Marciano’s interpretation of several fragments is notably literal rather than allegorical: words are taken at face value, for example as regards the human body and its relationship with the outside world. Here are no metaphors, but actual physical phenomena, as is confirmed by the Hippocratic treatise Regimen, and as R. B. Onians argued many years ago: the soul is physically connected to the body and the body is physically, directly connected to its environment in an anatomical and physiological sense. So also Heraclitus’ logos which is “to be heard”: this is not the regularity underlying natural phenomena, but the sage’s speech, his actual words, giving expression to reality in its entirety and complexity, enigmatic thought it is for mankind (fr. 3; 41; see pp. 365, 548).
While it is not possible here to discuss the individual fragments and their interpretation,——we can at least attempt to highlight some basic lines and original contributions. The dominant role is played by Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, followed by Heraclitus—both because of the abundance of evidence and its conceptual density, and also because of the undeniable traces of the teachings of Walter Burkert, whose pupil and colleague the editor was. Authors are not considered as philosophers in the Aristotelian sense of the word, and the very existence of doctrinal systems based on traditional categories is questioned. It is rather a matter of giving up general classificatory principles such as those of psychology, cosmology, biology, etc, which are consistent with the logic of ancient doxography but neglect the contexts of which those texts are expressions, their destination and fruition, and the very structure of the texts (prose vs poetry). This is an invitation to refrain from uniformity, and to limit the weight traditionally attributed to the relationships between the different authors, which ancient tradition has often constructed ex nihilo; thus, caution is adopted in the edition as regards possible influences, references, and mutual quotations.
The focus of attention, as far as possible, is on what Gemelli-Marciano calls the pragmatic aspect of production (p. XXIII), i.e. on reconstructing and giving due consideration to the cultural context of the text and its destination. Thales is traced back to a time when Panhellenic culture was embodied by rhapsodes who narrated the episodes described in the poems of Homer and Hesiod; he is conceived as a sage endowed with technical knowledge that he made available to his peers, namely the political leaders: he does not represent a (‘philosophical’) break with the rhapsodic tradition, but moves along with it, and must himself be interpreted with consideration of the destination of the text, the oral form of its dissemination and its communicative purposes. Compelling, and new, is the attention paid to the rhythm of both verse and prose (e.g. p. 549), which acquires meaning and plays a role in the interpretation.[4]
Anaximander and Anaximenes, unknown to the Greek world before Aristotle, are in turn regarded, respectively, a technical sage echoing Mesopotamian traditions (which allows us better to explain, as Burkert already did, several otherwise obscure aspects to the evidence for him); and someone deeply imbued with the archaic poetic tradition in an age of consolidation of Hellenic identity. As regards Pythagoras, the background against which he is placed is illuminating. This is made up of ‘divine men and purifiers’, figures, far removed from the speculative dimension of Plato and Aristotle, such as Aristeas of Proconnesus, Hermotimos of Clazomenae, Epimenides of Crete, Abaris the priest of Apollo Hyperboreus. Pythagoras, linking the Ionian world to “the complex cultural and religious panorama of Magna Graecia”, is not too different from Empedocles, who defined himself as a mantis, healer, itinerant purifier, and from Parmenides, who presents himself as the protagonist of a katabasis in the afterlife, a mystical experience in which the goddess—probably Persephone, queen of the underworld——let him share in knowledge of the truth.
The line of interpretation that runs through this first volume of this new edition extends as far as Xenophanes and Heraclitus. Rather than drawing a perfectly consistent picture of the figures under examination, Gemelli-Marciano attempts to redefine them by recovering the problematic nature that modern exegetes much too often tried to smooth out. She looks for differentiation instead of unifying categories.
The edition shows great philological precision and conceptual depth; it provides a critical apparatus where deemed necessary, in some cases adding indications of parallel passages below the translation. The commentary on the fragments is appreciably sober and precise, the bibliography up to date.
What makes this edition different and interesting is the fact that there is a clear interpretative proposal that spans the entire path we call pre-Socratic. There is something to be said, and not just neutral material to be rearranged and presented for the umpteenth time. It may well be that not everyone, and not always, will be willing to share the interpretative arguments, but it will be difficult to remain indifferent. And this is unquestionable merit in itself.
Notes
[1] Die Vorsokratiker, vol. 2. Düsseldorf, Sammlung Tusculum,.
[2] The Bibliographia Praesocratica edited by B. Šijaković in 2001 included 17,664 titles, and much has been done since.
[3] J. Manslfed, D. Runia, Aëtiana. 4 vols. Leiden, Brill, 1996-2020.
[4] This is well argued by Gemelli-Marciano in her book Parmenide: suoni immagini esperienza of 2013 (Sankt Augustin, Academia Verlag).