This chapter focuses on presocratic thinkers living in Magna Graecia (Sicily and southern Italy) in the sixth and fifth centuries bce. The main theme is the unity of opposites (a form of antithesis), treated in various ways by these thinkers, and the economic, political and mystic influences on their treatments. Parmenides’ radical separation between the one and plurality (or the paths of truth and opinion) reflects the contrast between possession of money and its circulation. This is informed by Parmenides’ aristocratic outlook; his account of the two paths is also modelled on mystic initiation. The Pythagoreans and Empedokles both adopt a more inclusive framework that embraces opposites within an overall unity, symbolising both the possession and circulation of money and a broad political structure. The Pythagorean cosmos, conceived in terms of fire, harmony and order or calculation, accommodates both poles in their table of opposites. Empedokles’ cosmic cycle includes the opposed subjectivities (with political connotations) of love and strife, while reincarnation accommodates divergent and opposed states of selfhood within an overall wholeness. Unity of opposites is framed by these thinkers in terms of the (introjected) inner self and (projected) cosmos, matching the wholeness offered by mystic initiation.

This chapter provides a discussion of the anxieties within (conventionally cisgendered) communities faced with the complex realities of transgender identities, sexual binarism and dysphoria. Ancient discourse tended to reduce this to a simple binary according to which conventional constructions of cisgendered bodies contrasted with a single representation of anomaly: the hermaphrodite. The story of Hermaphroditos, however, reveals that sexual hybridity and ethnic categorization (Karians and Greeks) operated in tandem and recursively: one group’s culture hero (as founder of marriage) become another’s intersex monstrosity. Hermaphroditos is only one example of a body undergoing sexual transformation, and other figures, such as Teiresias, Kaineus and even cross-dressing Achilles, illustrate that there existed a space for imagining alternatives to conventional categories. But an imaginative space is not a manifesto, and sexual anomaly (as it appears in ancient thinking) illustrates a trajectory of Greek culture: hybrids and anomalous bodies become partly decorative and, in literary works, interesting paradoxes, while their power to shock was largely relegated to the sphere of magic.