MELISSUS OF SAMOS

This article appears in Volume V18, Page 95 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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MELISSUS OF SAMOS , Greek philosopher of the Eleatic School (q.v.), was born probably not later than 470 B.C. According to

Diogenes

DIOGENES

Laertius, ix. 24, he was not only a thinker, but also a political leader in his native town, and was in command of the

fleet

FLEET

which defeated the Athenians in 442. The same authority says he was a pupil of Parmenides and of Heraclitus, but the statement is improbable, owing to discrepancy in

dates

DATES

. His works, fragments of which are preserved by Simplicius and attested by the evidence of Aristotle, are devoted to the defence of Parmenides' doctrine. They were written in Ionic and consist of long

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of argument. Being, he says, is eternal. It cannot have had a beginning because it cannot have begun from not-being (cf. ex nihilo nail), nor from being (ern yap av

arras

ARRAS

Kai of; yivoero). It cannot suffer destruction; it is impossible for being to become not being, and if it became another being, there would be no destruction. According to Simplicius (Physica, f. 22b), he differed here from Parmenides in distinguishing being and absolute being (rb airAws i6v). He goes on to show that eternal being must also be unlimited in magnitude, and, therefore, one and unchangeable. Any

change

CHANGE (derived through the Fr. from the Late Lat. cambium, cambiare, to barter; the ultimate derivation is probably from the root which appears in the Gr. «a urmu', to bend)

whether from internal or external source, he says, is unthinkable; the One is unvarying in quantity and in kind. There can be no division inside this unity, for any such division implies space or void; but void is nothing, and, therefore, is not. It follows further that being is incorporeal, inasmuch as all

body

BODY

has size and parts. The fundamental difficulty underlying this logic is the paradox more clearly expressed by Zeno and to a large extent represented in almost all modern discussion, namely that the evidence of the senses contradicts the intellect. Abstract argument has shown that

change

CHANGE (derived through the Fr. from the Late Lat. cambium, cambiare, to barter; the ultimate derivation is probably from the root which appears in the Gr. «a urmu', to bend)

in the unity is impossible; yet the senses tell us that hot becomes cold, hard becomes soft, the living dies, and so on. From a comparison of Melissus with Zeno of Elea, it appears that the spirit of dialectic was already tentatively at

work

WORK

, though it was not conscious of its own power. Neither Melissus nor Zeno seems to have observed that the application of these destructive methods struck at the root not only of multiplicity but also of the One whose existence they maintained. The weapons which they forged in the interests of Parmenides were to be used with equal effect against them-selves.
See Ritter and

Preller

PRELLER,
FRIEDRICH
- FRIEDRICH, JOHANN (1836— )
(1804–1878)
PRELLER, LUDWIG (1809–1861)

, 159-166; Brandis, Commentationum eleaticarum, pt.', p. 185; Mullach, Aristotelis de Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia ; Pabst, De Melissa samii fragmentis (Bonn, 1889), and histories of philosophy.

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