Greek Texts & Translations

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 ^note speaks thus ^note:

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. ^note The same philosopher [mentions him] in his Sophist, ^note [and Phaedrus,] ^note and calls him the Eleatic Palamedes. Aristotle says that Zeno was the inventor of dialectic, as Empedocles was of rhetoric.

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.

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. ^note In this version of the story most authors nearly agree, but Hermippus says he was cast into a mortar and beaten to death.

Of him also I have written as follows ^note :

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.

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." ^note

The fact that there were eight men of the name of Zeno we have already mentioned under Zeno of Citium. ^note Our philosopher flourished in the 79th Olympiad. ^note