e_ in all this?" "What is _my_ position with regard to this
eternally-existing reality?"

Of course this is not exclusively a characteristic of Parmenides, but
of the time. The idea of personal relation to an eternal Rewarder was
only vaguely held in historical times in Greece. The conception of
personal immortality was a mere pious opinion, a doctrine whispered
here and there in secret mystery; it was not an influential force on
men's motives or actions. Thought was still occupied with the wider
universe, the heavens and their starry wonders, and the strange
phenomena of law in nature. In the succession of the seasons, the
rising and setting, the fixities and aberrations, of the heavenly
bodies, in the mysteries of coming into being and passing out of it, in
these and other similar marvels, and in the thoughts which they evoked,
a whole and ample world seemed open for inquiry. Men and their fate
were interesting enough to men, but as yet the egotism of man had not
attempted to isolate his destiny from the general problem of nature.
{41} To the _crux_ of philosophy as it appeared to Parmenides in the
relation of being as such to things which seem to be, modernism has
appended a sort of corollary, in the relation of being as such to _my_
being. Till the second question was raised its answer, of course,
could not be attempted. But all those who in modern times have said
with Tennyson--

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why;
He thinks he was not made to die;
And Thou hast made him: Thou art just,

may recognise in Parmenides a pioneer for them. Without knowing it, he
was fighting the battle of personality in man, as well as that of
reality in nature.

{42}

CHAPTER V

THE ELEATICS (_concluded_)

_Zeno's dialectic--Achilles and the tortoise--The dilemma of being--The
all a sphere--The dilemmas of experience_

[106]

III. ZENO.--The third head of the Eleatic school was ZENO. He is
described by Plato in the _Parmenides_ as accompanying his master to
Athens on the visit already referred to (see above, p. 34), and as
being then "nearly forty years of age, of a noble figure and fair
aspect." In personal character he was a worthy pupil of his master,
being, like him, a devoted patriot. He is even said to have fallen a
victim to his patriotism, and to have suffered bravely the extremest
tortures at the hands of a tyrant Nearchus rather than betray his