Fragmenta
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P
Parmenides
Parmenides
c. 515 BCE–c. 445 BCE · Elea
Eleatic philosopher who argued that what-is is one, unchanging, and ungenerated; his poem On Nature decisively framed Greek ontology, prompting Plato's Sophist and Aristotle's Metaphysics.
“For the same thing is there both to be thought of and to be.”
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→
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Stop 1 of 3515 BCEBorn
EleaMagna Graecia (Lucania)
What they did here
Born at Elea (Velia) in southern Italy c.515 BCE; his floruit (acme c.504-501) is given by Diogenes Laertius 9.23, with Plato (Parmenides 127b) implying a birth around 515 BCE.
About Elea
A Greek colony on the coast of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) where Parmenides and his pupil Zeno founded the Eleatic school, daring to argue that all reality is one and unchanging—and that motion itself is an illusion.
In Elea at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Parmenides’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Zeno of Elea, Herodotus, Euripides, Antiphon, Socrates, Prodicus, Democritus, Thucydides, Critias, Antisthenes, Aristophanes, Lysias
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Parmenides’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.