at
the Ceramicus outside the wall, whither Socrates, then a very young
man, came to see them: Zeno was reading one of his theses, which he
had nearly finished, when Pythodorus entered with Parmenides and
Aristoteles, who was afterwards one of the Thirty. When the recitation
was completed, Socrates requested that the first thesis of the treatise
might be read again.'

'You mean, Zeno,' said Socrates, 'to argue that being, if it is many,
must be both like and unlike, which is a contradiction; and each
division of your argument is intended to elicit a similar absurdity,
which may be supposed to follow from the assumption that being is many.'
'Such is my meaning.' 'I see,' said Socrates, turning to Parmenides,
'that Zeno is your second self in his writings too; you prove admirably
that the all is one: he gives proofs no less convincing that the many
are nought. To deceive the world by saying the same thing in entirely
different forms, is a strain of art beyond most of us.' 'Yes, Socrates,'
said Zeno; 'but though you are as keen as a Spartan hound, you do not
quite catch the motive of the piece, which was only intended to protect
Parmenides against ridicule by showing that the hypothesis of the
existence of the many involved greater absurdities than the hypothesis
of the one. The book was a youthful composition of mine, which was
stolen from me, and therefore I had no choice about the publication.' 'I
quite believe you,' said Socrates; 'but will you answer me a question? I
should like to know, whether you would assume an idea of likeness in the
abstract, which is the contradictory of unlikeness in the abstract, by
participation in either or both of which things are like or unlike
or partly both. For the same things may very well partake of like and
unlike in the concrete, though like and unlike in the abstract are
irreconcilable. Nor does there appear to me to be any absurdity in
maintaining that the same things may partake of the one and many, though
I should be indeed surprised to hear that the absolute one is also
many. For example, I, being many, that is to say, having many parts or
members, am yet also one, and partake of the one, being one of seven
who are here present (compare Philebus). This is not an absurdity, but
a truism. But I should be amazed if there were a similar entanglement in
the nature of the ideas themselves, nor can I believe that one and many,
like and unlike, rest and motion, in the abstract, are ca