An alternative dating (Diogenes Laërtius,
Lives IX, 23, probably from Apollodorus's
Chronica) puts his birth about 25 years earlier, but this can be explained away.
Plato's remark (Sophist 242D) that the Eleatic school stems from Xenophanes is not to be taken seriously. Parmenides founded the school in the Phocaean colony of Elea in southern Italy, and its only other noteworthy members were his pupils Zeno and Melissus (the tradition that the atomist Leucippus was from Elea is probably false).
Writings
The work of Parmenides is not extant as a whole. Plato and Aristotle quote a line or two; from later writers, particularly Sextus Empiricus and Simplicius, about 150 lines can be recovered. Parmenides wrote in hexameter verse. All the fragments seem to come from a single work, which may have been called On Nature; it is unlikely to have been very long, and the fragments may amount to as much as a third of the whole. The survival of a long consecutive passage of more than sixty lines (Fr. 8) is of the greatest importance; it is the earliest example of an extended philosophical argument.
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