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1 Chapter 1 : Fragments of Perseus (New Directions Paperbook)-ExLibrary ebay The title poem presents fragments of an imaginary journal by Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae, slayer of the snake-haired Medusa, and husband of Andromeda. With "The Death of Kim Chuen Louie," we move from myth to reportage, ancient Greece to modern San Francisco's Chinatown, where the poet has come upon a murder. To navigate between open windows, hold down the Alt key and press TAB. This is the home page. From here, you can access many different parts of this web site. First, every time I make an update, I record it on the Update page with the date. The Site Overview is available, as well as an introduction to Heraclitus coming soon! This page contains many different options for viewing the fragments. Diels and Kranz DK put together one of the earliest collections of the fragments of the presocratic philosophers in the early s, and their numbering system is still widely used to cite the fragments. My textbook had this as the translation: I could have used this site to explore this fragment and realize what Heraclitus intended by this cryptic fragment. Greek Text The file loads with the Greek text first. The process takes less than five minutes and requires very little memory -- fonts are small! The buttons on the left frame are links to other files for this fragment. These resources are accessible from every fragment, so the user can look up words in a Greek dictionary or get help with grammar. It instructs users how to make certain features works, as well as giving advice about how to get the information they want. Choose "LSJ" under one, and then the other, to see the different meanings. In some places, I have edited the translations a little for various reasons. Mostly, I have done this to make the fragments sound better. Bold typing indicates a change. For B48, this translation is my own. This page deals with two major areas: First, I give here variant readings for the text. I give notes describing different scholars views about word choice and how that affects the interpretation. Secondly, I give here interesting things to note about the Greek words. Some fragments have more than one translation, and others have interesting aspects of interpretation that could be missed in English translation. On B48, for example, I explain the relationship between bios life and bios bow. Transliteration and Beta Code Many people will not be able to read the Greek on this site, either because they do not wish to download the font or because Greek is "all Greek" to them. For these users, I have provided two different transliterated systems. A transliteration system takes texts from one alphabet and writes them in another alphabet. Click the magnifying glass: It is how I typed the Greek on this web site. Click the magnifying class again to open up this key. These two pages make the Greek texts more accessible for different users. This commentary is my own. Only some of the fragments have individual commentary at this point. For most of the fragments, links to similar fragments and overviews for each category suffice. In places where I discuss the views of another author, a link leads to an annotated bibliography. Then choose the appropriate number, e. That will load DK B60 in the window, and that fragment can be explored just as we explored B Use the same method to get back to B Play the Audio This part of the site does not work yet. I added it for my own amusement, and I hope to add audio readings of all the files at a later time. Clicking a category takes the user to links to other fragments that I have also decided belong in that category. But for now, this allows the user to look through the fragments for others that relate to this one. Complete Files by Categories The bulk of my research effort went into dividing the fragments into categories. Links The links across the top of the page correspond to all the fragments that mention his predecessors. Each link takes the user to the individual fragments we looked at above. His attitude towards the poets was not very positive. A person could then look through this fragment as we looked through B48 above, looking at the Greek text and text notes, to see if anything interesting is going on in the text. Multiple Categories Each fragment can be put into multiple categories. This fragment, B, fits into three categories. This is one of the advantages to using hypertext for publishing the fragments. In a book, each fragment can only be listed once. When putting the fragments into a book by categories, each fragment can only fit into one category. This makes the categories smaller and less comprehensive. Listing fragments by DK number is a great idea for reference, but it makes the fragments seem disjointed. His new order also made his book too inefficient for reference. On the web, categories can overlap, giving a more complete and inter-connected picture of Heraclitus. Questions Each category page has a series of questions that will be answered or explored Page 1

2 in the fragments for that category. These questions are a quick way for users to tell if this is a category that interests them or not. Article Each category has a brief article that discusses the fragments and category in question. The way the DK ordered the fragments gives them a sense of disjointedness and isolation, but Kahn and others argue that the views of Heraclitus form a complete and consistent world picture. I saw this clearly when I began writing the articles for each category and found that I could not help but cross-reference the categories and fragments together. Links to individual fragments outside the category also helped create a comprehensive picture of Heraclitus that any arrangement in a printed book would have hidden. These articles are not intended to be works of great and new scholarship, but rather general introductions. Students of Heraclitus need to be familiar with the fragments and the general layout of his system before they dive into the secondary literature of scholarly views and opinions about the details â this site helps them do just that. This Category structure is very useful for two different methods of study. A user could go through all the fragments of a category to get a good handle on what evidence there is for each view. Reading an article, thinking about the questions, and reading through all the fragments one by one all the while enjoying the beautiful images provide a great summary of one position. But user could also go through all the categories of a fragment to get a good handle on what role that fragment plays in the whole system. Going through these one by one, thinking about the questions and reading the articles -- maybe even browsing briefly through some of the other fragments -- gives the user a good handle on fragment Individual Files The features mentioned thus far are intended for users who do not have any knowledge of Heraclitus or access to the fragments. For many users, this will not be the case. In order to make this site more useful to any user, I have included ways to view all the files individually. Part of the intellectual power used in creating a site like this is coming up with a way to organize all the material that makes it easy to reuse that same material. HTML and frames work provide many different ways to organize the translations, the text notes, the Greek texts, and all the other files. In a book, the author has to make many limiting choices. Should he put all the fragments together, followed by a commentary? Or should he put a fragment, then some commentary, a fragment, and then some more commentary? It depends on who the audience is, of course. What about Greek texts? Should the Greek and English be on opposite sides of facing pages, or one on top of the other, or no Greek at all? I have different editions of the fragments that do it differently. HTML makes it possible to do all of them! Click on the Heraclitus logo in the upper left-hand corner to take you back to the home page. First, imagine that a student is reading Heraclitus for a philosophy class. They know Greek, but the textbook just gives the fragments in English. A student like this may want to know what Greek work is being translated. For example, "Men are sure that [Hesiod] he knew very many things, he who did not know day and night: Only by looking at the Greek text could one see the difference and its significance. The page the loads uses the same files that the complete files use. Other users may be reading a commentary or article on Heraclitus. Others users might see B51 in a introductory textbook and wonder what a certain footnote might mean. For this, the student would want to consult the text notes. This loads a very similar page to the last one, but it loads all the text note files including the text notes we looked at under B I have made all the individual files available in this way. For a person only interested in one file per fragment say, the translations, this method of navigation is much easier and much more efficient. Even scholars could find this site useful. If a scholar were reading an article on Heraclitus that cited fragment numbers but did not quote them, or contained a footnote with references like "but see in contrast B54," this site could be used to quickly reference those fragments. These scholars might just need to see an English translation to remember which fragment B54 is. Page 2

3 Chapter 2 : FRAGMENTS OF PERSEUS POEMS blog.quintoapp.com Order the book, Fragments of Perseus [Paperback] in bulk, at wholesale prices. ISBN# by Michael McClure. Diels with little corrections; English translation: According to Diogenes Laertius he was "in his prime" B. However this may be, Parmenides was a contemporary, probably a younger contemporary, of Heraclitus, with whom the first succession of physicists ended, while Empedocles and Anaxagoras, with whom the second succession of physicists began, were very much his juniors. Belonging, it is said, to a rich and distinguished family, Parmenides attached himself, at any rate for a time, to the aristocratic society or brotherhood which Pythagoras had established at Croton; and accordingly one part of his system, the physical part, is apparently Pythagorean. To Xenophanes, the founder of Eleaticismâ whom he must have known, even if he was never in any strict sense of the word his discipleâ Parmenides was, perhaps, more deeply indebted, as the theological speculations of that thinker unquestionably suggested to him the theory of Being and Not-Being, of the One and the Many, by which he sought to reconcile Ionian "monism," or rather "henism," with Italiote dualism. Tradition relates that Parmenides Lamed laws for the Eleates, who each year took an oath to observe them. Parmenides embodied his tenets in a short poem, called Nature, of which fragments, amounting in all to about lines, have been preserved in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, Simplicius and others. In "Truth," starting from the formula " the Ent or existent is, the Nonent or non-existent is not," Parmenides attempted to distinguish between the unity or universal element of nature and its variety or particularity, insisting upon the reality of its unity, which is therefore the object of knowledge, and upon the unreality of its variety, which is therefore the object, not of knowledge, but of opinion. In "Opinion " he propounded a theory of the world of seeming and its development, pointing out however that, in accordance with the principles already laid down, these cosmological speculations do not pretend to anything more than probability. The introduction, though rugged, is forcible and picturesque; and the rest of the poem is written in a simple and effective style suitable to the subject. Borne in a whirling chariot, and attended by the daughters of the sun, he reaches a temple sacred to an unnamed goddess variously identified by the commentators with Nature, Wisdom or Themis, by whom the rest of the poem is spoken. He must learn all things, she tells him, both truth, which is certain, and human opinions; for, though in human opinions there can be no "true faith," they must be studied notwithstanding for what they are worth. There are three ways of research, and three ways only. Of these, one asserts the non-existence of the existent and the existence of the non-existent [i. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes suppose the single element which they respectively postulate to be transformed into the various sorts of matter which they discover in the world around them, thus assuming the non-existence of that which is elemental and the existence of that which is non-elemental]; another, pursued by " restless " persons, whose " road returns upon itself," assumes that a thing "is and is not," "is the same and not the same " [an obvious reference, as Bernays points out in the Rheinisches Museum, vii. These are ways of error, because they confound existence and non-existence. In contrast to them the way of truth starts from the proposition that " the Ent is, the Nonent is not. The Ent is uncreated, for it cannot be derived either from the Ent or from the Nonent; it is imperishable, for it cannot pass into the Nonent; it is whole, indivisible, continuous, for nothing exists to break its continuity in space; it is unchangeable [for nothing exists to break its continuity in time]; it is perfect, for there is nothing which it can want; it never was, nor will be, but only is; it is evenly extended in every direction, and therefore a sphere, exactly balanced; it is identical with thought [i. As then the Ent is one, invariable and immutable, all plurality, variety and mutation belong to the Nonent. Whence it follows that all things to which men attribute reality, generation and destruction, being and not-being, change of place, alteration of colour are no more than empty words. In the phenomenal world then, there are, it has been Thought [and Parmenides accepts the theory, which appears to be of Pythagorean origin], two primary elementsâ namely, fire, which is gentle, thin, homogeneous, and night, which is dark, thick, heavy. Of these elements [which, according to Aristotle, were, or rather were analogous to, the Ent and the Nonent respectively] all things consist, and from them they derive their several characteristics. The foundation for a cosmology having thus been laid in dualism, the poem went on to describe the generation of "earth and sun, Page 3

4 and moon and air that is common to all, and the milky way, and furthest Olympus, and the glowing stars"; but the scanty fragments which have survived suffice only to show that Parmenides regarded the universe as a series of concentric rings or spheres composed of the two primary elements and of combinations of them, the whole system being directed by an unnamed goddess established at its centre. Next came a theory of animal development. This again was followed by a psychology, which made thought [as well as sensation, which was conceived to differ from thought only in respect of its object] depend upon the excess of the one or the other of the two constituent elements, fire and night. Thus, while their question meant, or ought to have meant, What is the single element which underlies the apparent plurality of the material world? If we would discover that which is common to all things at all times, we must, he submitted, exclude the differences of things, whether simultaneous or successive. The fundamental truism is the epigrammatic assertion of this distinction. Having thus discriminated between the permanent unity of nature and its superficial plurality, Parmenides proceeded to the separate investigation of the Ent and the Nonent. The universality of the Ent, he conceived, necessarily carries with it certain characteristics. It is one; it is eternal; it is whole and continuous, both in time and in space; it is immovable and immutable; it is limited, but limited only by itself; it is evenly extended in every direction, and therefore spherical. These propositions having been reached, apart from particular experience, by reflection upon the fundamental principle, we have in them, Parmenides conceived, a body of information resting upon a firm basis and entitled to be called " truth. Its subject is, however, "Nature"; and nature, besides its unity, has also the semblance, if no more than the semblance, of plurality. Hence the theory of the unity of nature is necessarily followed by a theory of its seeming plurality, that is to say, of the variety and mutation of things. The theory of plurality cannot indeed pretend to the certainty of the theory of unity, being of necessity untrustworthy, because it is the partial and inconstant representation of that which is partial and inconstant in nature. But, as the material world includes, together with a real unity, the semblance of plurality, so the theory of the material world includes, together with the certain theory of the former, a probable theory of the latter. First, whereas it has been assumed above that Xenophanes was theologian rather than philosopher, whence it would seem to follow that the philosophical doctrine of unity originated, not with him, but with Parmenides, Zeller, supposing Xenophanes to have taught, not merely the unity of God, but also the unity of Being, assigns to Parmenides no more than an exacter conception of the doctrine of the unity of Being, the justification of that doctrine, and the denial of the plurality and the mutability of things. This view of the relations of Xenophanes and Parmenides is not borne out by their writings; and, though ancient authorities may be quoted in its favour, it would seem that in this case as in others, they have fallen into the easy mistake of confounding successive phases of doctrine, " construing the utterances of the master in accordance with the principles of his scholarâ the vague by the more definite, the simpler by the mere finished and elaborate theory " W. Secondly, whereas it has been argued above that "Opinion" is necessarily included in the system, Zeller, supposing Parmenides to deny the Nonent even as a matter of opinion, regards that part of the poem which has opinion for its subject as no more than a revised and improved statement of the views of opponents, introduced in order that the reader, having before him the false doctrine as well as the true one, may be led the more certainly to embrace the latter. In the judgment of the present writer, Parmenides, while he denied the real existence of plurality, recognized its apparent existence, and consequently, however little value he might attach to opinion, was bound to take account of it: By his recognition of an apparent plurality supplementary to the real unity, he effected the transition from the " monism " or " henism " of the first physical succession to the "pluralism" of the second. While Empedocles and Democritus are careful to emphasize their dissent from "Truth," it is obvious that "Opinion" is the basis of their cosmologies. The doctrine of the deceitfulness of "the undiscerning eye and the echoing ear" soon established itself, though the grounds upon which Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus maintained it were not those which were alleged by Parmenides. Indirectly, through the dialectic of his pupil and friend Zeno and otherwise, the doctrine of the inadequacy of sensation led to the humanist movement, which for a time threatened to put an end to philosophical and scientific speculation. The criticism was, however, preparatory to a reconstruction. Thus may be explained the selection of an Eleatic stranger to be the chief speaker in the latter, and of Parmenides himself to take the lead in the former. In the Sophist criticism predominates over reconstruction, the Zenonian logic being turned against the Page 4

5 Parmenides metaphysic in such a way as to show that both the one and the other need revision: In the Parmenides reconstruction predominates over criticismâ the letter of Eleaticism being here represented by Zeno, its spirit, as Plato conceived it, by Parmenides. Not the least important of the results obtained in this dialogue is the discovery that, whereas the doctrine of the "one" and the "many" is suicidal and barren so long as the "solitary one" and the "indefinitely many" are absolutely separated C seq. In short, Parmenides was no idealist, but Plato recognized in him, and rightly, the precursor of idealism. Diels, in Parmenides Lehrgedicht, griechisch u. Vorsokratiker Berlin, 2nd ed. The philosophical system is expounded and discussed by E. Gomperz, Griechische Denker Leipzig, ; Eng. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy London, For the cosmology, see A. On the relations of Eleaticism and Platonism, see W. For other texts, translations, commentaries and monographs see the excellent bibliography contained in the Grundriss d. Chapter 3 : Fragments â Sophocles, Hugh Lloyd-Jones Harvard University Press Note: Citations are based on reference standards. However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied. Chapter 4 : Parmenides, Greek fragments and Burnet's English translation Fragments of Perseus by Michael McClure and a great selection of similar Used, New and Collectible Books available now at blog.quintoapp.com Chapter 5 : Greek texts - E to G - ancienttexts This page contains many different options for viewing the fragments. Diels and Kranz (DK) put together one of the earliest collections of the fragments of the presocratic philosophers in the early s, and their numbering system is still widely used to cite the fragments. Chapter 6 : Greek texts - H - ancienttexts We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. Chapter 7 : Fragments of Perseus Download Fragments Of Perseus written by Michael McClure and has been published by New Directions Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on with Poetry categories. Chapter 8 : Fragments Of Perseus by McClure, Michael Click on the links in the left frame to load the file for the desired fragment in this frame. Chapter 9 : EURIPIDES, Dramatic Fragments Loeb Classical Library Fragments of Perseus by Michael McClure, and: Heavy Breathing by Philip Whalen (review) Arthur Winfield Knight; Western American Literature;. Page 5