Chapter 5. ZENO OF ELEA
[
25]
Zeno was a citizen of
Elea. Apollodorus in his
Chronology says that
he was the son of Teleutagoras by birth, but of Parmenides by
adoption, while Parmenides was the son of Pyres. Of Zeno and
Melissus Timon
1 speaks thus
2:
Great Zeno's strength which, never known to fail,
On each
side urged, on each side could prevail.
In marshalling
arguments Melissus too,
More skilled than many a one, and
matched by few.
Zeno, then, was all through a pupil of
Parmenides and his bosom friend. He was tall in stature, as Plato
says in his
Parmenides.3 The same philosopher [mentions him] in his
Sophist,4 [and
Phaedrus,]5 and calls him
the Eleatic Palamedes. Aristotle says that Zeno was the inventor of
dialectic, as Empedocles was of rhetoric.
[
26]
He was a truly
noble character both as philosopher and as politician ; at all
events, his extant books are brimful of intellect. Again, he plotted
to overthrow Nearchus the tyrant (or, according to others,
Diomedon) but was arrested : so Heraclides in his epitome of
Satyrus. On that occasion he was crossexamined as to his
accomplices and about the arms
which he was
conveying to Lipara ; he denounced all the tyrant's own friends,
wishing to make him destitute of supporters. Then, saying that he
had something to tell him about certain people in his private ear,
he laid hold of it with his teeth and did not let go until stabbed
to death, meeting the same fate as Aristogiton the tyrannicide.
[
27]
Demetrius in his work on
Men of the Same
Name says that he bit off, not the ear, but the nose. According
to Antisthenes in his
Successions of
Philosophers, after informing against the tyrant's friends, he
was asked by the tyrant whether there was anyone else in the plot ;
whereupon he replied, "Yes, you, the curse of the city!" ; and to
the bystanders he said, "I marvel at your cowardice, that, for fear
of any of those things which I am now enduring, you should be the
tyrant's slaves." And at last he bit off his tongue and spat it at
him ; and his fellow-citizens were so worked upon that they
forthwith stoned the tyrant to death.
6 In this version of the story
most authors nearly agree, but Hermippus says he was cast into a
mortar and beaten to death.
[
28]
Of him also I have written as
follows
7
:
You wished, Zeno, and noble was your wish, to slay the
tyrant and set Elea free from bondage. But you were crushed ; for,
as all know, the tyrant caught you and beat you in a mortar. But
what is this that I say? It was your body that he beat, and not
you.
In all other respects Zeno was a gallant man ; and in
particular he despised the great no less than
Heraclitus. For example, his native place, the Phocaean colony,
once known as Hyele and afterwards as Elea, a city of moderate
size, skilled in nothing but to rear brave men, he preferred before
all the splendour of Athens, hardly paying the Athenians a visit,
but living all his life at home.
[
29]
He was the first to propound
the argument of the "Achilles," which Favorinus attributes to
Parmenides, and many other arguments. His views are as follows.
There are worlds, but there is no empty space. The substance of all
things came from hot and cold, and dry and moist, which change into
one another. The generation of man proceeds from earth, and the soul
is formed by a union of all the foregoing, so blended that no one
element predominates.
We are told that once when he was
reviled he lost his temper, and, in reply to some one who blamed him
for this, he said, "If when I am abused I pretend that I am not,
then neither shall I be aware of it if I am praised."
8
The fact that there
were eight men of the name of Zeno we have already mentioned under
Zeno of Citium.
9 Our philosopher
flourished in the 79th Olympiad.
10
