Fragments

What survives of Zeno of Elea

Nothing Zeno of Elea wrote survives complete. These 3 lines reached us only because later writers copied them into works of their own, usually while arguing about something else.

  1. DK 29 B3, Wording secure

    Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 140.28 (c. 540 CE)

    Quoted verbatim by a commentator who wanted his readers to see the argument in Zeno's own words rather than in Aristotle's compressed report of it.

    The paradoxes everyone knows — Achilles and the tortoise, the arrow — reach us only as Aristotle's summaries. Not one sentence of them is Zeno's.

  2. DK 29 B1, Wording secure

    Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 141.1 (c. 540 CE)

    Copied out in the same passage, as the argument that anything with size can always be divided again.

  3. DK 29 B2, Wording secure

    Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 139.11 (c. 540 CE)

    The other half of the argument: what has no size adds nothing, so cannot be a part of anything.

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