Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/275

253 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 253 had veiled in poetic forms.* Tiie other, Zeno of Elea, a friend and disciple of Parmenides, also developed the doctrines of Parmenides in a prose work, in which his chief object was to justify the disjunction of philosophical speculation from the ordinary modes of thought (co£a). This he did, by showing the absurdities involved in the doctrines o*" variety, of motion, and of creation, opposed to that of an all-compre- hending' substance. Yet the sophisms seriously advanced by him show how easily the mind is caught in its own snares, when it mistakes its own abstractions for realities ;f and it only depended upon these Eleatics to argue with the same subtlety against the doctrine of ex- istence and unity, in order to make it appear equally absurd with those which they strove to confute. §13. Before we turn from the Eleatics to those other philosophers of Italy, to whom the name of Italic has been appropriated, we must notice a Sicilian, who is so peculiar both in his personal qualities and his philosophical doctrines, that he cannot be classed with any sect, although his opinions were influenced by those of the lonians, the Eleatics, and the Pythagoreans. Empedocles of Agrigentum does not belong to so early a period as might be inferred from the accounts of his character and actions, which represent him as akin to Epimenides or Abaris. It is known that this Empedocles, the son of Meton.J ilourished about the eighty-fourth Olympiad, b. c. 444, when he was concerned in the colony of Thurii, which was established by nearly all the Hellenic races, with unanimous enthusiasm and great hopes of success, upon the site of the ruined Sybaris. Aristotle considers him as a contemporary of Anaxagoras, but as having preceded him in the publication of his writings. Empedocles was held in high honour by his countrymen of Agrigentum. and also apparently by the other Doric
 * ,tates of Sicily. He reformed the constitution of his native city, by

abolishing the oligarchical council of the Thousand ; which measure gave such general satisfaction, that the people are said to have offered him the regal authority. The fame of Empedocles was, however, Melissus LnSimplic. ad Phyg. f. 22 b. " If nothing exists, what can be predicated of it as of something existing? But if something exists, it is either produced or eternal. If it is produced, it is produced either from something which exists, or from something which does not exist. But it is impossible that anything should be produced from that which does not exist ; for, since nothing which exists is pro- duced from that which does not exist, much less can abstract existence (to acrXas sov) be so produced. In like manner, that which exists cannot be produced from that which does not exist; for in that case it would exist without having been pro- duced. That which exists cannot therefore change. It is, therefore, eternal."' t Thus Zeno, in order to disprove the existence of space (which he sought lo diprove. for the purpose of disproving the existence of motion), argui d as follows: "If space exists, it must be in something ; there must, therefore, be a spare i ou- tlining space." He did not consider that the idea of space is only conceived, in order to answer the question, In what? not the question, What? I There was an earlier Empedocles, the father of Meton, who gained the prize with the race-horse in Olymp. 71.
 * In order to give an example of his manner, we translate a fragment of