METAPHYSICS while the Colossus is not But analogous statements would be quite natural in ancient Greek, and this sense of ‘be’ is certainly involved in Parmenides’ talk of Being All that there is, all that exists, is included in Being However, the Greek verb ‘to be’ occurs not only in sentences such as ‘Troy is no more’ but also in sentences of many diVerent kinds, such as ‘Helen is beautiful’, ‘Aphrodite is a goddess’, ‘Achilles is brave’, and so on through all the diVerent modes that Aristotle was to dignify as categories For Parmenides, Being is not just that which exists, but that of which any sentence containing ‘is’ is true Equally, being is not just existing (being, period) but being anything whatever: being hot or being cold, being earth or being water, and so on Thus interpreted, Being is a realm both richer and more puzzling than the totality of existents Parmenides’ Ontology Let us now look in detail at some of Parmenides’ mysterious claims, expressed in his rugged verse, which I have tried to render in an equally clumsy translation What you can call and think must Being be For Being can, and nothing cannot, be (DK 28 B6) The Wrst line (literally: ‘What is for saying and for thinking must be’) expresses the universality of Being: whatever you can call by any name, whatever you can think of, must be Why so? Presumably because if I utter a name or think a thought, I must be able to answer the question ‘What is it that you are talking about or thinking of?’ The message of the second line (literally ‘It is for being be but nothing is not’) is that anything that can be at all must be something or other; it cannot be just nothing The matter becomes clearer when Parmenides, in a later fragment, introduces a negative notion to correspond to Being Never shall this prevail, that Unbeing is; Rein in your mind from any thought like this (DK 28 B7, 1–2) My ‘Unbeing’ represents the negation of Parmenides’ participle (me eonta) I use the word instead of some formula such as ‘not-being’ because the context makes clear that Parmenides’ Greek expression, though a perfectly 200