Parmenides of Elea: A Verse Translation with Interpretative Essays and Commentary to the Text

Martin J. Henn’s Parmenides of Elea offers to the reader a reinvigorating verse translation of the Diels and Kranz B-Fragments of Parmenides cast in rhyming couplet iambic pentameter. Placing Parmenides in his proper historical context by taking seriously the impact of Persian Zoroastrianism on his developing monism, Henn supplies precise interpretation of the most difficult and vexing of Parmenides’s fragments, while also providing reliable philosophical analysis of the many seeming contradictions latent in the text.

The interpretive essays form a unique contribution to studies of this work, exploring such issues as the sprawling influences of Persian Zoroastrian dualism, literary parallels and contrasts with Hesiod’s Theogony, and the radical antithesis between a finite linear and an infinite closed-loop model of space and time. Overall, Henn’s work represents a new model for study of a key element of philosophical literature, making it a highly significant addition to the scholarship on the subject.