ABSTRACT
By the mid-sixth century Athens was perhaps the second strongest power in Old Greece, but, except in pottery, her artistic pre-eminence and her intellectual pre-eminence hardly antedated the mid-fifth century. As the alliance of 477 turned into the empire, so ideas and thinkers from outlying parts of the Greek world were drawn to the centre of that empire. Plato (Parmenides 127a-c) describes a visit paid to Athens in about 450, on the occasion of a Great Panathenaia, by the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides, the first man to advance a sustained deductive argument, and his follower Zeno. If the youthful Sokrates heard Zeno on that occasion, he will have experienced the power of the new-forged logical weapon of reductio ad absurdum-rendering a thesis absurd by showing that it involves an admitted absurdity.
