Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Zeno of Elea. Apollodorus says in his Chronology that he was by nature the son of Teleutagoras, but by adoption the son of Parmenides (and that Parmenides was the son of Pyres). Concerning him and Melissus, Timon says the following: “And the great, not feeble strength of double-tongued Zeno, critic of all things, and Melissus too, above many delusions, yet yielding to a few.” Now Zeno had heard Parmenides lecture and had become his beloved. He was also tall of stature, as Plato says in the Parmenides; and the same Plato mentions him in the Sophist and the Phaedrus, calling him the Eleatic Palamedes. Aristotle says that he became the discoverer of dialectic, just as Empedocles was of rhetoric.

​He proved to be a man of the greatest nobility both in philosophy and in politics. At any rate, books of his full of great understanding are in circulation. Desiring to depose the tyrant Nearchus—or according to others, Diomedon—he was arrested, as Heraclides says in his Epitome of Satyrus. On that occasion, when he was examined concerning his accomplices and about the weapons that he was conveying to Lipara, he denounced all the tyrant's own friends, wishing to leave him isolated. Then, saying that he had something to tell him in his ear, he bit onto it and did not let go until he was stabbed to death, suffering the same fate as the tyrannicide Aristogeiton.

​Demetrius says in his Men of the Same Name that he bit off the tyrant's nose. Antisthenes, in his Successions, says that after denouncing the tyrant's friends, when asked by the tyrant whether there was anyone else, he said, “You, the curse of the city!” And to the bystanders he said, “I marvel at your cowardice, if for fear of these things which I now endure, you remain slaves to the tyrant!” And finally, biting off his own tongue, he spat it at him; whereupon the citizens, stirred to action, immediately stoned the tyrant to death. Nearly the same account is given by most writers. But Hermippus says that he was cast into a mortar and pounded to pieces.

​And concerning him we ourselves have written as follows: “You wished, O Zeno, you wished a noble thing: to slay the tyrant and deliver Elea from slavery. Yet you were overcome; for the tyrant seized you and truly in a mortar pounded you. Why do I say this? For it was your body, and not you!” Zeno was in other respects an excellent man, but he was also contemptuous of men of higher rank, just like Heraclitus. For he loved the city once called Hyele and later Elea, a colony of the Phocaeans and his native city—a frugal town that knew only how to rear good men—more than the boastful pride of the Athenians, never visiting them at all, but spending his life right there.

​He was also the first to formulate the argument of “Achilles” (though Favorinus says it was Parmenides) and numerous others. His doctrines were as follows: that worlds exist, and that there is no void; that the nature of all things arose from hot, cold, dry, and moist, as these elements undergo change into one another; that the generation of men is from earth, and that the soul is a mixture of the aforesaid elements, with none of them holding dominance. They say that when he was reviled, he became indignant; and when someone reproached him, he said, “If I do not take notice when I am reviled, neither shall I feel it when I am praised.” That there have been eight men named Zeno, we have explained in our account of Zeno of Citium. This one flourished during the seventy-ninth Olympiad.