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Greek seafaring between the 10th and 6th centuries BCE gave rise to a technical culture centered around navigation, commerce, and international cultural exchange. The Greeks were not a unified nation in the modern sense, confined to a territory centralized in Attica or the Peloponnese. Instead, they were a collection of independent city-states (poleis) spread across the Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Black Sea. The intense commercial relationships among these Greek settlements and with other peoples wove a Mediterranean cultural web that fostered a genuine spirit of intercultural exchange, leading to a new cultural synthesis that gave the Greeks – and the world to this day – an extraordinary drive for originality. This technical culture, which Rossetti calls the “cultura dell’attendibilità,” was based on observation, objectivity, and rationality. Without these principles, and relying solely on myth, seafaring could never have flourished. This shift away from myths to a new culture is testified by Xenophanes, who, in DK B 18 (LM D53), contrasts the ancient method of gaining knowledge through communication with the gods with a new method of research that in time yields better results.

Cultural heritage, its perception and its narration tell us a lot about the identity of a people: some testimonies from the Byzantine Empire offer us an opportunity to reflect on the correlation between landscape and political affinity that is fully manifested in total and unconditional admiration for Constantinople and that reveals the favour of God in the realisation of a globalised community.

The ideology of imperial power during the late Byzantine age shows an element of predestination in the choice of the new emperor, above all through rhetoric sources such as enchomiastic speeches. This meant that the criterion of imperial power’s legitimisation was gradually diverted from popular election/acclamation to dynastic succession.

The paper examines closer the notion expressed by the word amēkhaníē in DK 6. 5. In his analysis of problematic of knowledge Parmenides alerts about amekhaníē of mortals, a word generally translated with `lack of resources` or ‘perplexity’, a kind of problem that drives the thinking astray. Scholars point out in many passages of the poem the opposition between imperfect mortals and the eidóta phōta of DK 1. 3, the wise man. However, as much as I know, nobody noticed that, if mortals have a lack of resources, the goddess is teaching exactly how to fix it with a kind of method given through her precepts, which are an authentic mēchané. The paper shows that this is the genuine didactic aim of Parmenides, as he says in 1.28-30, i.e., to point out where is the error of mortals and how the wise man fixes it. Starting from a reinterpretation of 1.29 and following with the analysis of fr. 6, the paper shows that the method of fr. 2 is indeed the mēchané that can do that. Although the word is not present in the poem, it is one of its main topics. It seems (by the extant fragments) Parmenides had no clear word to call his mēchané, a psychological cognitive tool we call today principle of non-contradiction.