Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-hgkh8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T10:10:46.528Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Plato's testimony concerning Zeno of Elea*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Gregory Vlastos
Affiliation:
Department of PhilosophyPrinceton University

Abstract

In the opening paragraphs of Plato's Parmenides (126A–128E) we learn of a work by Zeno which could be read comfortably at a single sitting. As we know from the surviving fragments, it was full of extraordinarily compressed material. So we could hazard the guess that it could not have taken more than an hour or so to read, since the reading was to be a preliminary to extended discussion. Such a length would match that of the earliest works of scientific prose which have survived intact: the Hippocratic treatises. On Ancient Medicine is about 5,000 words; On Airs, Waters, Places about 6,800. A work of even 5,000 words would have contained the originals of all of Zeno's arguments of which we know and many more besides. From the way the book is talked about here we get the impression that it contained the whole of Zeno's oeuvre. The references are to a single work written when Zeno was still ‘very young’ (say, twenty or a little more). Zeno is made to say it had been ‘stolen’ from him (i.e. put into circulation by unauthorised third parties) before he had made up his mind to publish. If he had put out other works thereafter we would expect some reference to them to drive home his point that the pugnacious temper of that youthful work should not be thought to represent his present outlook. Diogenes Laertius (9, 26) speaks of βιβλία, but in a context which gives no indication that he is following a reliable source. The four titles listed by Suidas (a very late source, perhaps of the tenth century A.D.) inspire no confidence.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1975

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ast, D. Friedrich, Lexicon Platonicum (first edition, 1835; reprinted, Berlin, 1908). Abbreviated to ‘Ast’.Google Scholar
Boeckh, Augustus, The Public Economy of the Athenians, tr. by G. C. Lewis (London, 1842).Google Scholar
Burnet, John, Early Greek Philosophy (fourth edition, London, 1930).Google Scholar
Burnet, John, Plato's EUTHYPRO, APOLOGY, and CRITO, edited with notes (Oxford, 1924).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calogero, Guido, Studi sull'Eleatismo (Rome, 1932).Google Scholar
Campbell, Lewis, The SOPHISTES and POLITICUS of Plato (Oxford, 1867).Google Scholar
Cherniss, Harold, ‘Plato (1950–1957)’, Lustrum 1960, Band4.Google Scholar
Clark, Pamela, ‘The Greater Alcibiades’, Class. Quarterly 5 (1955), 231–40.Google Scholar
Cornford, F. M., Plato and Parmenides. Translation, with introduction and running commentary, of Parmenides' Way of Truth and Plato's Parmenides (London, 1939).Google Scholar
Crombie, I. M., Examination of Plato's Doctrines, Vol. II, Plato on Knowledge and Reality (London, 1963).Google Scholar
Diels, Hermann, and Kranz, Walther, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols. (sixth edition, Berlin, 1952).Google Scholar
Diès, Auguste, Platon, PARMÉNIDE, Vol. VIII, part 1, of Platon, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris, 1923).Google Scholar
Dodds, E. R., Plato's GORGIAS (Oxford, 1959).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fränkel, H., ‘Zeno of Elea's Attacks on Plurality’, American Journal of Philology 63 (1942), 125, 193–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fritz, Kurt von, ‘Zenon von Elea’, Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Zweite Reihe, Neuzehnter Halbband, 1972, 5383.Google Scholar
Fritz, Kurt von, ‘Zenon von Elea’, Grundprobleme der Geschichte der antiken wissenschaft (Berlin, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guthrie, W. K. C., A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. I, The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge, 1962); Vol. II, The Presocratic Tradition From Parmenides to Democritus (Cambridge, 1965); Vol.III The Fifth-Century Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1969).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Edith, and Cairns, Huntington, The Collected Dialogues of Plato (New York, 1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, E. L., ‘Was Gorgias a Sophist?Phoenix 18 (1964), 183–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heidel, W. A., Pseudo-Platonica, dissertation (Baltimore, 1896).Google Scholar
Heidel, W. A., ‘The Pythagoreans and Greek Mathematics’, American Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61 (1940), 1 ff.Google Scholar
Hicks, R. D., Diogenes Laertius' ‘Lives of Eminent Philosophers’, translated into English (London; vol. 1, 1925; vol. 2, 1931).Google Scholar
Kahn, C., Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York,) 1960.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kleingünther, A., Πρῶτος Εὑρετής, Philologus, Suppl. Vol. 26 (1934).Google Scholar
Lee, H. D. P., Zeno of Elea (Cambridge, 1936).Google Scholar
Mourelatos, A. P. D., The Route of Parmenides (New Haven, Conn., 1970).Google Scholar
Nestlé, Wilhelm, Vom Mythos zum Logos (second edition, Stuttgart, 1942).Google Scholar
Owen, G. E. L., ‘Eleatic Questions’, C.Q. 10 (1960), 84102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, R., Plato's Earlier Dialectic (second edition, Oxford, 1953).Google Scholar
Shorey, P., What Plato Said (Chicago, 1933).Google Scholar
Solmsen, Fr., ‘The “Eleatic One” in Melissus’, Mededelingen Nederlandse Akad., 32 (1969), 221–33.Google Scholar
Solmsen, Fr., ‘The Tradition about Zeno of Elea re-examined’, Phronesis 16 (1971), 116–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stokes, M. C., One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).Google Scholar
De Strycker, E., ‘Le Premier Alcibiade’, in J, Bidez, Eos (Brussels, 1945), 101 ff.Google Scholar
Taran, L., Parmenides (Princeton, 1965).Google Scholar
Taylor, A. E., Plato's PARMENIDES (Oxford, 1934).Google Scholar
Tod, M. N., ‘The Economic Background of the Fifth Century’, Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 5 (Cambridge, 1953).Google Scholar
Untersteiner, M., Zenone (Florence, 1963).Google Scholar
Vlastos, Gregory, review of Fränkel's Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens, Gnomon 31 (1959), 193 ff.Google Scholar
Vlastos, Gregory, review of Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), 531 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vlastos, Gregory, ‘A Note on Zeno's Arrow’, Phronesis, 11 (1966), 318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vlastos, Gregory, ‘Zeno of Elea’, Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967), Vol. 8, 369–79.Google Scholar
Vlastos, Gregory, ‘A Zenonian Argument Against Plurality’, in Essays in Ancient Philosophy, edited by Anton, J. P. and Kustas, G. L. (Albany, N.Y., 1971).Google Scholar
Vlastos, Gregory, Platonic Studies (Princeton, 1973).Google Scholar
Zeller, Eduard, Die Philosophie der Griechen, Vol. I, Part I (seventh edition, Leipzig, 1923), Vol. I, Part II (sixth edition, Leipzig, 1920).Google Scholar