Parmenides built Ameinias a hero shrine on his death. Diogenes Laertius in “Lives of the Philosophers” says this isn’t true, Parmenides learned from Ameinias, a Pythagorean. Plato’s successor Aristotle took the joke as fact and passed it on.
The Athenian philosopher Plato joked that Xenophanes was Parmenides’ teacher. Athens won the war and the Athenian versions of history have swamped the stories of Velia. Kingsley indicates that Zeno died running weapons to opponents of Athens. Parmenides and Zeno travelled to Athens as Velian ambassadors. Ongoing excavations at the site of Velia throw some light on Parmenides, born there in 501, and his successor Zeno who was a decade younger. In the sixth century BCE the Phocaeans sailed to Italy and founded the city of Elea, now called Velia. Phocaea was a Greek city on the coast of Anatolia. Parmenides’ insights are interesting enough on their own. I think in the case of this book it’s a bit of a distraction – it points back at the rational mind which the prose is working to bypass. This is a guiding theme for Kingsley and an important point. The story challenges scholastic traditions which center civilization on Athens. Through his stylistic choices it seems this is also what Kingsley means his own book to do. Kingsley describes the poem’s style as incantory, invoking a trance state. It focuses on Parmenides and his visionary poem “On Nature”.
It’s a conversational narrative, parceling out information in small bits and retracing ideas. He writes in a strikingly simplistic style. It’s a scholarly work making a serious point but Kingsley sweeps away the academic apparatus and banishes notes to the end of the book. Peter Kingsley’s book In the Dark Places of Wisdom is a story.
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