Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/326

312 the dialogue, this must mean that the book was written before 460 B.C., and it is very possible that he wrote others after it. If he wrote a work against the "philosophers," as Souidas says, that must mean the Pythagoreans, who, as we have seen, made use of the term in a sense of their own. The Disputations (Ἐρίδες) and the Treatise on Nature may, or may not, be the same as the book described in Plato's Parmenides.

It is not likely that Zeno wrote dialogues, though certain references in Aristotle have been supposed to imply this. In the Physics we hear of an argument of Zeno's, that any part of a heap of millet makes a sound, and Simplicius illustrates this by quoting a passage from a dialogue between Zeno and Protagoras. If our chronology is right, it is quite possible that they may have met; but it is most unlikely that Zeno should have made himself a personage in a dialogue of his own. That was a later fashion. In another place Aristotle refers to a passage where "the answerer and Zeno the questioner" occurred, a reference which is most easily to be understood in the same way. Alkidamas seems to have written a dialogue in which Gorgias figured, and the exposition of Zeno's arguments in dialogue form must always have been a tempting exercise.

Plato gives us a clear idea of what Zeno's youthful work was like. It contained more than one "discourse," and