s
the moderns; for they deprive many--and those great things--of the
appellation of ENS or BEING; such as are voidness, time, place, and
simply the entire genus of things spoken, in which are comprised all
things true. For these things, they say, are not ENTIA but SOME
THINGS; and they perpetually treat of them in their lives and in their
philosophy, as of things having subsistence and existence.

But I would willingly ask this our fault-finder, whether themselves do
not in their affairs perceive this difference, by which some things
are permanent and immutable in their substances,--as they say of their
atoms, that they are at all times and continually after one and the
same manner, because of their impassibility and hardness,--but that
all compound things are fluxible, changeable, generated, and perishing;
forasmuch as infinite images are always departing and going from them,
and infinite others as it is probable, repair to them from the ambient
air, filling up what was diminished from the mass, which is much
diversified and transvasated, as it were, by this change, since those
atoms which are in the very bottom of the said mass can never cease
stirring and reciprocally beating upon one another; as they themselves
affirm. There is then in things such a diversity of substance. But
Epicurus is in this wiser and more learned than Plato, that he calls
them all equally ENTIA,--to wit, the impalable voidness, the solid and
resisting body, the principles, and the things composed of them,--and
thinks that the eternal participates of the common substance with that
which is generated, the immortal with the corruptible, and the natures
that are impassible, perdurable, unchangeable, and that can never fall
from their being, with those which have their essence in suffering and
changing, and can never continue in one and the same state. But though
Plato had with all the justness imaginable deserved to be condemned
for having offended in this, yet should he have been sentenced by these
gentlemen, who use Greek more elegantly and discourse more correctly
than he, only as having confounded the terms, and not as having taken
away the things and driven life from us, because he named them FIENTIA
(or things engendered), and not ENTIA (things that have being), as these
men do.

But because we have passed over Socrates, who should have come next
after Parmenides, we must now turn back our discourse to him. Him
therefore has Colotes begun