ABSTRACT
In the Parmenides, Zeno is made to describe the treatise quoted as a work of his youth, which had not been intended for publication. The treatise was designed to show that still more absurd consequences follow from the critic's own thesis, that there exists a plurality of things. Zeno it has been clear that the pluralist critics of Parmenides were Pythagoreans. Zeno's fragments show that the 'things' which they asserted to be many, in spite of Parmenide's demonstrations, were not the elements of Empedocles or the homo eomeries of Anaxagoras. Zeno is attacking a form of the original doctrine that all things are numbers. Anaxagoras negates one fundamental doctrine of Atomism: the existence of physically indivisible bodies. The statement is interesting as being probably earlier than the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus. Empedocles and Anaxagoras have been mentioned for the sake of comparison with a third way of escape from Parmenidean monism.
