В темных областях мудрости

So Parmenides is saying how he's bound to the charioteers who brought him to the underworld, the charioteers that right from the beginning he refers to as kourai—young women, girls, daughters of the Sun.

He arrives as a kouros together with kourai, and it couldn't be otherwise. The place he's reached is a place where everything comes together with its opposite: earth and heaven, night and day, light and darkness but also male and female, mortality and immortality, death and youthfulness. And even the fact that his partners are daughters of the Sun, beings of light who are at home in the darkness, couldn't be more appropriate. Later Parmenides explains how—in terms of the grand illusion we live in—humans themselves are originally solar beings, children of the sun.

Death for us seems just nothingness, where we have to leave everything behind. But it's also a fullness that can hardly be conceived of, where everything is in contact with everything and nothing is ever lost. And yet to know that, you have to be able to become conscious in the world of the dead.

Kouros is an ancient word, older even than the Greek language. Often it's a title of honour, never an expression of contempt. When the great poets before Parmenides used the term it was always to communicate a sense of nobility. It was the kouros, more than anyone else, who was a hero.

In terms of physical age, it could mean someone under thirty. But in practice the word had a far wider meaning. Α kouros was the man of any age who still saw life as a challenge, who faced it with the whole of his vigour and passion, who hadn't yet stood back to make way for his sons. The word indicated the quality of a man, not how old he was.

It was also closely connected with initiation. The kouros stands at the borderline between the world of the human and the world of the divine; has access to them both, is loved and recognized in both. It's only as a kouros that the initiate can possibly succeed at the great ordeal of making a journey into the beyond—just as Parmenides does.

The kouros has a great deal in common with the world of the divine. In their own way they're both timeless, untouched by age. When Heracles dies and is made immortal, it's as a kouros that he's pictured rising up from the funeral pyre. And the situation of the nameless kouros face to face with the nameless goddess, just like Parmenides—this was a well-known scenario in the mysteries of initiation.