Melissus of Samos Quotes on Truth

Melissus of Samos (mid-5th c. BC) — the Eleatic philosopher and Athenian general whose surviving fragments preserve the only continuous early-Eleatic philosophical text — gave classical Greek metaphysics its most rigorous early systematic argument for the unity, infinity, and unchangeability of being. The central commitments — that what is must be ungenerated and indestructible (since coming-to-be from nothing is impossible), spatially infinite (since limit would presuppose a beyond), one (since plurality would require limit), and unchanging (since change would require coming-to-be or destruction) — develop and modify the Parmenidean argument with greater philological clarity than the surviving Parmenides fragments preserve. The framework supplied a principal philosophical target for the post-Eleatic Pre-Socratics (Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the atomists) and Plato’s late dialogues and remains a canonical early statement of monistic metaphysics.