Elea

Certain · excavated (Velia), Italy

A small Phocaean colony on the Italian coast that produced the profoundest turn in early philosophy: Parmenides’ poem on the way of truth — that what is, is, and cannot not be — and Zeno’s paradoxes in its defense. Plato’s Parmenides and Sophist, in this library, wrestle with “father Parmenides” directly; the stranger of the Sophist is an Eleatic. Excavations at Velia have recovered the school’s later medical-philosophical line.