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.
The Fragility of Ancient Papyrus
None of the early Greek philosophers left manuscripts that survived antiquity. Their prose books and philosophical poems disappeared into the dust of Mediterranean library fires, political upheavals, and decay. The few sentences we possess today survived solely because later commentators—from Aristotle and Simplicius to Diogenes Laërtius and Sextus Empiricus—quoted them while writing treatises of their own centuries later.
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.
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.
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.
Zeno of Elea
(c. 495 BCE – c. 430 BCE)Zeno was Parmenides' student and defender. When critics mocked the idea that change is impossible, Zeno answered not with theories but with puzzles. If Achilles gives a tortoise a head start, he can never catch it, because he must first reach where the tortoise was, by which time it has moved on. An arrow in flight is at rest at every instant, so it never moves. These paradoxes were not riddles. They were arguments designed to show that the critics' own assumptions about space, time, and motion led to absurdity.
Quotes & Sayings by Zeno of Elea
“If everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place, and so on to infinity.”
“Before the arrow reaches its target, it must first reach the halfway point. But before that, the quarter. There is no first step — and so motion cannot begin.”