Vitae philosophorum

Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes Laertius. Hicks, R. D., editor. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925.

Melissus, the son of Ithaegenes, was a native of Samos. He was a pupil of Parmenides. Moreover he came into relations with Heraclitus, on which occasion the latter was introduced by him to the Ephesians, who did not know him,[*](Cf. supra, § 15.) as Democritus was to the citizens of Abdera by Hippocrates. He took part also in politics and won the approval of his countrymen, and for this reason he was elected admiral and won more admiration than ever through his own merit.

In his view the universe was unlimited, unchangeable and immovable, and was one, uniform

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and full of matter. There was no real, but only apparent, motion. Moreover he said that we ought not to make any statements about the gods, for it was impossible to have knowledge of them.

According to Apollodorus, he flourished in the 84th Olympiad.[*](444-440 b.c.)

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 [*](Fr. 45 D.) speaks thus[*](Cf.Il.xxiii 827; v. 783.):

    Great Zeno’s strength which, never known to fail,
  1. On each side urged, on each side could prevail.
  2. In marshalling arguments Melissus too,
  3. 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.[*](127 b.) The same philosopher [mentions him] in his Sophist,[*](p. 216 a.) [and Phaedrus,][*](261 d.) 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

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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.