Plato now turns to a brief survey of early Greek thought, presumably to put Parmenides in his historic context. Each early thinker, according to the Visitor, “it seems to me, tells us a story as if we were children, one that there are three beings, which quarrel with each other over some things, then make up, marry, have children, and bring them up. Another says there are two, wet and dry or hot and cold, and they marry and give in marriage.” Next we meet the Eleatics, starting with Xenophanes or even earlier, “who tell in their stories about all the things called many being only one.” Then there are the Ionian and Sicilian Muses who “say being is both many and one, related by strife and love. The stricter Muses say, ‘being at variance it ever agrees.’”[9] The more easy-going Muses say that at one time everything is brought to unity in love by Aphrodite, at another time things are rendered hostile to each other by Strife.[10]
Plato seems to trivalize the debate as a childish dispute. But of course the disagreement has emerged as the central controversy of early Greek philosophy, as Plato himself must be aware. Plato’s version gives at best a fuzzy picture of the issues of early Ionian philosophy before Parmenides. And by making Xenophanes the founder of the Eleatic school, he downplays the role of Parmenides as well as missing the real contributions of Xenophanes himself, who was by birth an Ionian and offered his own cosmological theory. This chronology (or at least the order of presentation) makes Heraclitus, arguably the predecessor of Parmenides, his successor. Plato also makes Heraclitus (follower of the stricter Muse) the companion of Empedocles of Sicily (follower of the more easy-going Muse, who posits four elements governed by Love and Strife), whereas Empedocles was clearly a self-appointed disciple of Parmenides and successor of both Heraclitus and Parmenides.
Plato’s brief excursus into the history of Greek philosophy is less enlightening than it might have been. More importantly, his story fails to consider how different philosophers engaged with their predecessors. To espouse different theories is not to enter into a conversation with others. Yet there is ample evidence that the early thinkers were at least trying to agree or disagree with other thinkers in arguments. It is precisely this interaction that makes it possible to call them philosophers in a time before the word philosophos had come to designate a practice or profession; for the early thinkers were philosophizing avant la lettre.
Plato seems to make Xenophanes the founder of Eleatic monism, without ascribing any particular argument to him. Plato seems to confuse Xenophanes’ monotheism (he argues, for the first time in the Greek tradition, that there is one god) with material monism (there is one kind of matter that everything is made of—a view he does not seem to hold). Plato ignores Parmenides, in a passage that seems designed to feature him. He makes Heraclitus, who rejects the No-Becoming thesis, the blood brother of Empedocles, who champions it. In general, his brief essay on the origins of Greek philosophy seems to obscure more than it reveals.
[9] An apparent citation of Heraclitus fr. 51.
[10] Plato Sophist 242c-243a.