Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus and Zeno are to be reckoned as belonging to this school. Xenophanes may be regarded as the founder of it; Parmenides is supposed to have been his pupil, and Melissus, and especially Zeno, are called the pupils of Parmenides. In fact, they are to be taken together as forming the Eleatic school; later on it lost the name, being then called Sophistic, and its locality was transferred to Greece proper. What Xenophanes began, Parmenides and Melissus developed further, and similarly Zeno perfected what these two taught. Aristotle (Metaph. I. 5) characterizes the first three thus: “Parmenides seems to comprehend the one as Notion (_κατὰ τὸν λόγον_), Melissus as matter (_κατὰ τὴν ὕλην_); hence the former says that it is limited (_πεπερασμένον_) and the latter that it is unlimited (_ἄπειρον_). But Xenophanes, who was the first of them to express the theory of the One, made the matter no plainer (_διεσαφήνισεν_), nor did he deal with either of these aspects (_φύσεως_), but looking into the heavens”—as we say, into the blue—“said, God is the One. Xenophanes and Melissus are on the whole less civilized (_μικρὸν ἀγροικότεροι_); Parmenides, however, is more acute (_μᾶλλον βλέπων_).” There is less to say of Xenophanes and Melissus, and what has come to us from the latter in particular—in fragments and derived from the sayings of others—is still in a state of ferment, and in his case there is least knowledge obtainable. On the whole, philosophic utterances and Notions are still poor, and it was in Zeno that Philosophy first attained to a purer expression of itself. 1. XENOPHANES.